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Managing Last.FM's "Mountain of Data"
Rob Spengler writes "Last.FM co-founder Richard Jones says the biggest asset the company owns is 'hundreds of terabytes of user data.' Jones adds, '... playing with that data is one of the most fun things about working at the company.' Last.FM, for those who have been living on Mars for the last two years, is the largest online radio outlet, with millions of listeners per day. The company surpassed Pandora and others largely due to its unique datamining features: 'Audioscrobbler,' the company's song/artist naming algorithm, can correctly determine a track even with tens of thousands of false entries. Jones says sitting on that much data has even helped police: 'thieves listening to music on an Audioscrobbler-powered media player have helped police in the US, UK, and other countries track down users' stolen laptops.' Does sitting on a mountain of data make Last.FM powerful enough to start making a stand against the record industry? CBS certainly thinks so — they bought the company for £140 (~$200) million last year."
Excellent point. Think of the impact this could have on psychology!
;) Tinfoil hats for sale! Get your tinfoil hats here!
To get you into the right mood, think of the impact it could have on mind manipulation
The summary wasn't insulting enough, so I think I'll just add a bit extra.
Last.FM is so popular that if you aren't familiar with the service, you must be a drooling, knuckle dragging luddite.
Apparently I'm not one of the cool kids. I'm sad now, and my feelings are hurt.
I think we have enough teacher-student sex scandals without a matchmaking web site!
Information wants to be free.
Information wants to be a ballerina.
Best Slashdot comment ever
Information wants to be free.
Information wants to be a ballerina.
Then information needs to get her fat ass on a diet or she's never going to fit into that tutu and make Mommy proud!
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
I disagree. When I was a senior in HS, we had a smoking hot student teacher. I would have paid to get molested by her.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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figuring out how to turn that data into money ... might involve some black magic, and definitely requires luck too.
So what you are saying is:
1. Data
2. ???
3. Profit!
:~)
Then why the hell is it that when I run the "Recommendations" stream the algorithm occasionally freaks out and starts pushing one unlistenable noise attack after another at me with tags like brutal death metal, cybergrind, czech, death metal, deathgrind, goregrind, grind, grindcore, noisecore, porngrind, pornogrind, etc. No matter how many times I click the "Do Not Want" button the stuff just keeps coming. It's like a neighbour from hell. And then there's the days when I get nothing but lesbian deathcore vegan grind.
The Last.FM brainfarts seem to persist no matter how many times yoy try to train the recommendation engine using the like/ban buttons and the only way to get them to "reset" to something vaguely approximating normality is to log out, log back in, and run the Library stream for a while.
Still, even with this weirdness it's still better than Pandora at finding new music I actually like.
Da Blog
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