Journal Week Ten

The music sites listed on visualcomplexity are certainly interesting. Some of them it's clear that they are produced by academics or academic institutions. Some, it's not so clear who the author or creator is. I also wonder how they get the word out. The academic sites are probably being presented at conferences, sent to funding institutions, given to professors or advisers for grading or otherwise used in an academic setting. How are these sites advertising or presenting themselves? Are they waiting for people to discover them on this site, are they presenting their vision to larger companies like Apple, Google or? The parent site started out as an academic endeavor, but it's a dot-com now. The founder works for Nokia, a for profit company.

I visited http://www.formater.de/wordpress/ from visualcomplexity. I like the idea of organizing ideas around the nodes and having a zoomable interface. It also seems like it would be easy to discover new music through this interface. The interface graphics that they feature, at least in this mockup, are very unattractive to me. It reminds me of the Windows Real Player interface, which I hate. I really like the clean, light colored iTunes, however.

I also visited http://www.reactable.com/reactable/. I want one! It looks like an incredible, fun interface. The colors and graphics are attractive, and look almost like they were designed for children. I would love to play with this. Because of its reliance on physical proximity and relationships, it reminds me of the theremin.

So Google has started a music search. I played around with it for a little while. I like it, but when I followed the link to lala.com I could only listen to 30 second clips. From Google's search page, I could listen to the entire song. Granted, I could only listen to a few songs. I know lala is only one of the services that the search results use, and I'm not sure if it would be the same experience at the other sites. With lala, however, I'm a little resentful that I would have to sign up to get access to the information. You don't have to sign up when you search for videos, you don't have to sign up when you go to read a Wikipedia article. Google, as a for-profit company, rides that fine line between providing information for the public as a service like the library, or providing information to profit off of it. It's a rough little road, and I'm curious to see how they come out the other side, especially when it comes to the Google Book project. An in-depth comparison of Google and the Internet Archive would be really interesting in that regard.

Another thing I found I wanted from this week's lesson is the poster of the Genealogy of Pop & Rock Music. How cool is that? And such an attractive way to display information. In contrast to the more interactive sites from visual complexity, this is an engaging way to draw an audience in without Web 2.0 techniques.