I’ve started using an interesting web service called Audioscrobbler to publish information on the music I’m listening to. It works like this. You install a software agent (plugin) that knows how to interrogate your preferred digital music player to find out what’s playing. In my case, that means running the plugin for iTunes on Mac OSX, but most popular software is supported. Periodically the plugin uploads the list of tracks you’ve played to the audioscrobbler server, which builds a page for each user (here’s mine) showing what they’ve listened to recently, plus a bunch of statistics. (If you’re off the net, the plugin caches the information until you reconnect.) The server also calculates affinity groups, and shows you recommendations based on what other people who like the same music you do are listening to.
But this is a security risk, isn’t it? After all, who knows what information the plugin might be sucking off your system? Well, actually, I know! All of the plugins are open source, and I was able to read through the source code for the plugin to verify its behaviour before I installed it. And although this isn’t proof of good intentions, the raw data is available under a Creative Commons license. In fact a colleague of mine is using the data in a research project.
So now you can see what I’m listening to, on my Mac or on my iPod. One warning: I’m having iTunes play through some of my favourite material each night, just to load a statistically meaningful dataset. So if it looks as if I’m listening to stuff when I ought to be sleeping, relax. Anyway, right now it’s working through my Captain Beefheart collection: it’s up to “Safe As Milk” on Strictly Personal. An awesome track….