The first web 2.0 nominee site I looked at was a very cool music site called Last.fm. Last.fm describes itself as working in the following way:
Every track you play will tell your Last.fm profile something about what you like. It can connect you to other people who like what you like - and recommend songs from their music collections and yours too ...
... When you recommend some music to a friend, or you tag it, or you write about it - even just listening to it - you shift the song's importance on the site. It'll be recommended to different people, because you've listened to it. It'll move up our music charts and maybe more people will hear it because you thought it was good.
... When you recommend some music to a friend, or you tag it, or you write about it - even just listening to it - you shift the song's importance on the site. It'll be recommended to different people, because you've listened to it. It'll move up our music charts and maybe more people will hear it because you thought it was good.
With a free 30 song trial I explored. Last.fm will stream "radio" for you based on your music tastes. You can also browse genres, watch videos, read bio details about artists, find out about coming music concerts. There are links to buy music too. All in all, a big number of services this site provides which was exciting albeit a bit overwhelming for an impatient-to-see-it-all novice. The layout is nice even though they cram a lot of features in. I got the sense it required a bit of practice to get comfortable with all it has to offer. I will definitely visit again in order to discover more music I've never heard of before. Gotta love that! All I need now is some better speakers for my computer so I can really enjoy it.
I came away thinking Library OPACS could take a few lessons from Last.fm. I think Last.fm aims to be a music-hub giving you personalised "radio" based on your tastes, as well as access to discover different music genres, video etc. Could library OPACS could aim to be such an information hub? Perhaps even when our library users log in they could leave comments, tags etc to rate their favourite books etc as Last.fm users do to music. These are not new ideas for OPACs, I know, but after seeing Last.fm I can see how it might work now.
I treid to check out Pandora - an internet radio site - but couldn't get access to it because it is no longer able to operate outside of the U.S. Bummer!
I also checked out MOG. MOG describes itself as "web's best daily music newspaper". I can't dispute its "daily" tag because I looked at it two days in a row and the content on its homepage was quite different from one day to the next. So, my first impression was that it holds a lot of content and that it is supra-quickly updated. In fact it has so much much information that I found it overwhelming at first (again) and I struggled a bit to figure out what the site was actually trying to be. Like Last.fm you can sign-in an receive a personalised service but I got a lot out of it just by looking around without signing in.
Can any of MOG be applied to a library setting? Yes! Perhaps library websites could be updated daily with links to relevant web-content (blogs, news, music). Perhaps we could personalise our library service so our signed-up users receive messages from us recomending books/blogs/reviews/publishing news/author news etc they would be interested in?
In light of these brief explorations there seems to be so much more library OPACS and websites could do: personalisation is in the front of my mind right now as a future online service libraries could offer as well as giving users the ability to comment and tag.
You are so right!! When you look at 'whats out there and possible' we don't even make a little scratch on the surface. We have to personalize soon or be left behind all the sites and IT options that have already climbed on that bus.
ReplyDelete