via Last.fm – the Blog · Mad Science + Awesome! = New playground apps.

snip of last.fm tube tags visualisation for alter

The “Tube Tags” map snipped above is a visualisation of alter‘s listening habits, using music tags and related artists as this fictional Tube main lines and stops, and changes as lines directions (so e.g. as I was listening more of Mozart the corresponding classical music brown line goes up or “North”, and the same for the yellow “Folk” line as more of Stefano Miele was scrobbled).

The link above from Last.fm official blog has more on the topic — in short, the team has beefed up the service “playground” area with some new visualisations, available only to subscribers but visible to everyone.

I like the idea very much, even though no practical implication is evident at the moment — or maybe exactly for this reason. This is also really on the same lines that were discussed in Vertigo, a conceptual design and exploratory research work on which I have been active over the last few months (in Vertigo the scope was larger than music and included movies, pictures, linear media in general).

I am fascinated by the idea that visualisations can be informative and entertaining at the same time.  It’s a blend of functional and aesthetic (or edonistic) values that to me is badly needed in the digital space, where they are often separated (so that you might have applications or services that are either overtly functional or overtly easthetic-driven, or let’s say dominated by formal technological and media experimentation — not a bad thing as such of course! in both instances).

See here below another example, a collage of top artists pictures (again, alter‘s view).

CitySounds.fm opens a dozen such fascinating windows by delivering the latest music from some of the world’s most interesting cities, from Sydney to Stockholm to San Francisco.

via Global Soundscape: CitySounds.fm | Brain Pickings

This is a fascinating way of listening, or, better, explore music, especially new music – one of the most attractive aspects to me in services à la last.fm. The idea of connections between media and real world contexts is also one of the guiding principles of Vertigo.

Last week in Bergamo I had the opportunity to attend the two-days 4th technical and funding workshop promoted by CREATE-NET, a dynamic international research institute in Trento;  “the focus of CREATE-NET’s research is on the Internet of the Future, both in terms of infrastructure and service”. I was invited there because of my previous work in FP6 projects (MobiLife and SPICE, both with Neos), links with the industry (I actually extended the invitation to a major Italian publisher) and established contacts with people working there (this time I have been also introduced to CREATE-NET president, professor Imrich Chlamtac).

The workshop was very well organized and to me it has been quite satisfying to join an event like this in Italy for once (instead of Bruxelles or some capital up in the Nordic region — I love the Belgian beer and the Nordic light, but I can not rush there with my motorbike in 45 minutes ;) (joking… but the relative rarity of these settings in Italy is an issue; I will not discuss it here anyhow).

Talking about content, I enjoyed very much the informal exchanges with a few other attendants interested in the “networked media and 3D Internet” research area of the forthcoming 2009 calls (including friends from some of my preferred examples of excellence in European ICT research like HIIT and Fraunhofer FOKUS). We started discussing after a very nice visualization example of Last.fm listenings made with Vizter (created by super-brilliants Jeffrey Heer and Danah Boyd) from a Tampere Technical University Hypermedia Lab researcher; having just seen an overview of the research agenda brought forward by NEM, a prominent European and global forum on future media and network technologies, we had an initial but intense chat on possible research proposals at the intersection of media management and consumption, social network visualization and other related stuff.