Last.fm isn’t just for humans
April 26th, 2006 | Published in metadata
While I’m talking BBC, here’s a story from a little while ago. I’m a big fan of last.fm, and I’ve been using it for a few years. Because I used to play my MP3s on a headless linux box in my flat, I wrote a commandline python mp3 player that could ping last.fm. My profile is a pretty good picture of my listening habits.
At BBC Radio, the radio stations are moving steadily from traditional analogue studios to fully digital systems that play nearly all their music from hard disk. As a member of the Architecture Team there, I had access to experimental data feeds from these systems. One day at work I asked myself a question: what happens when you plug behavioural data generated by an automatic process into social software designed for humans?