Tagging

CNN has a post on Tagging and how it's the new rage.

This has seemed obvious to me for a long time - that associating tags with items is much more useful than attempting to place them in a hierarchy. The main reason I started making my own music library manager a few years ago was because I wanted to tag songs, not categorize them.

So maybe I was ahead of my time. But here are some other things I wanted to do with Marc, and where they stand.

  • Playing music to somewhere other than the PC running the app. Apple has done this with Airport Express, and I'm very impressed. It's not perfect, but it's pretty close. The combo box I put on the Marc interface to let you choose what PC to play the music out of is very similar to what Apple puts on the iTunes interface when it detects an Airport Express on your network. I wish I could override it so that when I left the computer upstairs streaming to the stereo I didn't have to go upstairs to shut it off before streaming from the laptop in the living room, and I wish I could stream to a computer, not just to the Extreme.
  • Multi-User Ratings. iTunes falls flat here, and nothing else really seems to be trying either. If you live in a house with other people, chances are you won't all like the same music. My solution currently is to create a "stuff neither of us hates" playlist and use that, but really I think we could use a little software help here. It wouldn't be difficult to let us each rate songs, and then build playlists like "songs everyone rates 4 or higher".
  • Mood-based Automatic Playlist Building. Something like the attention.xml spec that's going around for RSS readers, having a system that allows the player to upload playlists for a server analyze, and then use that data to help with automatic playlist building, would be excellent. For example, few people would put Garth Brooks in a playlist with Metallica. Today playlist builders work based on genre or keywords, but really, why not have them work based on what other people have done? Given a million playlists, it wouldn't be hard to use that data to help dynamically build playlists that users will like more than the keyword or tag based ones we get now. I'm hoping that Apple's ability to upload a playlist to the iTunes music store is a step in this direction.
  • Song recommendations. This is similar to the previous suggestion. If the automatic playlist generator looks at your songs and builds you a playlist, it can also use the data it built the playlist with to suggest "hey based on what I've seen other people listening to, I think this song would fit into your playlist really well".

    Guess I'll check back in in a couple of years and see how much closer we are to having all this.

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