Personal Projects
Code, robots, hacks and various other things I do.
Nominated for a Lionheart by Robin Hood the movie
16 Apr. 2010
I have been recognized for my charity work with Robin Hood by the upcoming Robin Hood movie. The grand winner wins $5000 for them and their charity and the runners up each win $500.
Please see my Lionheart profile for more information and remember to click the button that says 'I support this Lionheart'!
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Stewart Smith discusses Stewdio at the Apple Store in Soho
19 Feb. 2010
UConn and Stewart Smith
I met Stewart through music. I was in Boston but was commuting to UConn, in Storrs, CT, to play in a band. JP and Brad were in the same design program as Stew, and our band practiced in the attic of the UConn Design Center.
Stewart has done some very impressive things with his talents. He's the man behind browser pong, windmaker, iQuit and Tweed Magazine. He also helped built Terre Natale, an incredible visualization of geological and statistical Earth data.
Here is an interview from Tweed where Stewart is interviewing my band with Brad and JP, First Aid Kit. I think this interview must be almost 7 years old now... Cripes.
Stewdio @ Apple Store in Soho
Stewart is speaking about his design work and his company, Stewdio, at the Apple Store in Soho on Monday. Stew, and his wife, recently moved to London too so we'll surely hear some of that story too.
I will be there. You should be too!
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Robonova
14 Jan. 2010
February. After the conference. It's on.
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Music interest software, twitter as a protocol and #myownlastfm
13 Jan. 2010
I need 300 cc's of stats STAT!
I am a sucker for statistics. I've completely fallen for their ability to describe what has happened. And it's interesting trying to use them to predict what will happen. For this reason, I love tools like Last.fm. And this is why I'm bummed when tools like Last.fm aren't as popular as tools like Pandora.
I am grouping them in two separate ways because Last.fm group attempts to use statistical correlations in listening habits and the Pandora attempts to use algorithms and analysis done by musicologists. Care to guess which one is winning actually winning the market over? I would bet money it's Pandora. Just be staying out of the topic and waiting for people to bring these things up, I have heard more Pandora than anything else. On top of that, there is reason to believe CBS (owners of Last.fm) have been lazy with it since they acquired it in 2007.
Inquirer's dilemma
This approach unfortunately also demonstrates an inquirer's dilemma: do your promote the tool you like or do you stay quiet and wait for the honest reactions of people who've just discovered one of the two services? You should also know that I made that term up. There might be a better term. Perhaps incompleteness?
With this particular topic, I have largely chosen to stay quiet and wait to hear what people say. We live in a time where tools that are neat find their way to the top of people's minds in an artificial, yet organic, way. We distribute the data and then rank them compared to the days data. We ask, "what do people care about?" Because of this, I don't feel as though I'm unhelping my personal favorite by not promoting them. As an example, how many people do you now that haven't heard of Pandora or Last.fm? Do they own an iPhone? (To be fair, those two might be strongly correlated...) A recent poll done on mashable shows that they appear to be tied. It's a small poll with 2465 votes.
How to choose
I wanted Last.fm to be better. I love the idea that it's based on how people actually behave instead of trained opinions. Unfortunately, I have experienced problems with it that motivated me to remove the software twice. After removing it once I fell for it again, installed it, and shortly after I got frustrated enough to remove it yet again. It might be due to my setup, so I'll describe that. I have all of my music on an external hard drive and have iTunes configured to know that. It works fine but sometimes loading is slow. With Last.fm installed I experienced extreme slowness when hooking up my iPhone to report what I listened to. Often enough it would completely fail to report anything. Argh!
Often enough my friends have suggested I use Pandora to listen to stations by band name. If I choose a Mastodon station, it knows what kind of other music I'd like. Last.fm tries to do this too. The difference in their approaches reveals interesting ways of thinking about music. Pandora's musicologists will consider the shape of the song as a single work and describe it to a machine. The machine can those uses those stats to look at songs and determine if they're similar. Last.fm purely listens to what you're listening to and then maps it to other people who listen to the same stuff. It will suggest anything in that pool of similarity that you haven't heard.
And so the benefits of using Last.fm or Pandora's algorithm become the deciding factors. Last.fm has proven useful to me when I'm in dire need of new music and am exploring a new genre. For example, I really like Amon Tobin and some other electronic music, but I'm hardly an expert. I listened to Amon Tobin, Alarm Will Sound and Aphex Twin and Audio Scrobbler sent that data to Last.fm. Last.fm suggested quickly that I check out Xploding Plastix. I had never heard of them, but they were awesome. So Last.fm found the gaps in my library.
Pandora, on the other hand, seems to take into account whether or not a band is up and coming. It will place bands gaining popularity in the stations and help spread the word. Last.fm doesn't seem to do this because it converges on averages in the statistics. It's as though it tells you what's popular that you haven't heard and Pandora tells you what will be popular. Last.fm seems to get redundant awfully fast though...
#myownlastfm
It's hard to beat an approach that will find the new things before they're big. That's the buzz behind Twitter and it's connections to real-time search. But I'm convinced Twitter is actually more of a protocol than a status service. It sends small message fragments around and people group the fragments with free-form tags, like #iranelection or #tigerwoods. So what if I submit my listening habits to Twitter with #myownlastfm as a tag? I think I'd still need to filter by username too, but that combination might be sufficient for tracking my listening habits.
I'm going to keep doing this for a while. Twitter, I'm convinced you're more useful as a message exchange protocol and other sites, start-ups in particular, can provide the context for the messaging.
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Robin Hood fed all 120,000 people!
06 Jan. 2010
This is fantastic news!
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Robin Hood Fund Raiser
11 Nov. 2009
The Robin Hood Winter fund raiser is tomorrow night. The $50 entrance fee is used directly as a donation to feed 8 people. Please join us!
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Robin Hood
10 Nov. 2009
Robin Hood
Robin Hood is a charity that focuses on those in distress in New York City. In their words: Robin Hood targets poverty in New York City by finding and funding the best and most effective programs and partnering with them to maximize results.
The team at Robin Hood is renowned for their experimental nature with regard to processes for raising money. They are also known for trying to figure out the source of poverty and go after that rather than simply putting band-aids on the problems.
IFed and #feednyc
I was contacted by a friend of mine at The New York Times and was asked if I’d like to help explore how to integrate social media with Robin Hood’s cause. I couldn’t resist the chance to help those in need.
After a couple meetings we decided we’d build a system to help spread our message across Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. John Merlino, a designer from FRESHTHRILLS, whom I’ve worked on multiple projects with, worked on the graphics and I did the programming for what eventually became known as Robin Hood’s I Fed page.
We had a successful launch on Monday and the message flew through Twitter. You can see it’s message propagated by searching for #feednyc or by simply visiting the IFed page. It’s success has led to John and myself being designated co-chairs of the fund-raising event on Thursday, which Tiki Barber of the New York Giants will be hosting.
If you’re feeling philanthropic and can part with some money, please head over to ifed.robinhood.org for more information on how you can help. You can also get up-to-the-minute listings on what the twitter world is saying about Robin Hood’s holiday message. If you can’t spare any money this winter, please just spread the message using our Twitter or Facebook tools on the left side of the page.
Robin Hood’s mission is to feed 120,000 people in NYC this winter. Towards this goal, they have partnered with Fresh Direct, J2 Labs, FRESHTHRILLS and many people from the startup community in NYC.
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