Comments on: Rocker Peter Gabriel offers Filter to cut through online clutter

Musician is backing a recommendation engine that combines a wide range of people's tastes to deliver suggestions more likely to "entertain, excite, and inspire."

[dascha1]

What is a Recommendation Engine?

My brother-in-law says he likes it when listening to Internet
Radio Feeders that if a song by Queen plays he then hears a
song that was released/popular around the same time. My view,
problem becomes when the Station's Program Manager and the
Listening Audience both require their Requests at the same time
(i.e. DJ's response is, can't play it now as our Program manager
has a policy to play what is scheduled).

Go figure Peter - and while you're at it, get a Music Industry
college degree with a focus on Natural Language Processing and
Extraction.

[Len Bullard]

Shannon 101

That's the gray goo of a multiple selector. It's Shannon 101: given any set of choices, what selector causes one to be preferred, then if multiple selectors are applied, do they result in a different choice? You can apply weighting criteria or any other control variable in a second order system or go to a third order system to control the variables selected. Just remember that multiple controls on the same input/output are a recipe for chaos.

Taste based systems (filters) are golems. Useful until they become authoritative; then they become monstrous. Such is the case with policies that don't adapt such as a program manager's playlist. Look for hidden couplers. For example where once payola required payments of some form to station managers, the legal way is to buy ads.

If we cling to our tastes, we become old school rather quickly. If we have no tastes, we become lemmings. What I want the filter to do is connect things from very different domains so my tastes will evolve by differentiation instead of getting locked into a sub-optimum minima.

Good luck, Gabriel. As always, you are pulling the train.

[hparkeragain]

I Love News Stories About Vapor Ware!

You know, I'm sure Peter Gabriel is a visionary. But please, if the site he's pushing is not even available for use, why write about it? Just silly. Maybe you should have Hulk Hogan promote Duke Nukem next on the front page.

[kieranmullen]

Like pandora.com

Except for it doesn't stream music and allows for video matching in tastes?

KieranMullen
http://www.360Oregon.com

[dascha1]

Well, prefer a 'toolkit' rather than just listening

An Internet Radio toolkit for pro's would be a better suit. I mean,
why can't you run your own Radio Station?

[maxo3]

The advise of an washed up rock star

That's all we need in life to be happy. I think we should pay him millions for his insight.

[i_made_this]

Too Much Information?

Gabriel's not the average elder statesman of rock. He's a very smart guy who started pushing the envelope of audio technology as early as his first solo albums in the 1970's. He started his own website to distribute his own musical content back in the early 1990's (online.net - now defunct).

His 2008 investor group's idea is a good one but it's already been done with mixed results legally and excellent results musically. The Music Genome Project's musical taste profiling radio service www.pandora.com is pretty darn good - surprisingly so - but they were taken off-line a few months ago in UK due to an apparent conflict with certain British telecomm regs.

In any event, Pandora's available in the USA - and the Pandora media player is based on OpenLaszlo, to make it a useful cross-platform service. If such a service as Gabriel describes is of interest to you, I recommend giving pandora.com a try.

The most useful way to test the quality of its AI algorithm is to enter a very obscure recording artist as the base for your first personal station creation and test Pandora's talent.

[Mats Svensson]

Another Fluff-filter site, just adding more fluff

Great, ANOTHER site where you have to sign up to get inside so you can find out if its worth the bother to sign up.

I must have 1000 throw-away acccounts at sites like that.

I wish you could install a filter (without signing up somewhare) so you never had to even hear about sites like that ever again.

[galacticgufus]

i think the line about 'freedom from choice' sums up the position of the record industry in a succinct manner