Felix Miller on The Musical myware

Felix is from last.fm, which I haven’t used. However, I’m definitely going to give it a try after seeing Felix’s talk. Last.fm is all about harnessing collective intelligence for music. The basic idea is that you install a plugin to your music player and it uploads everything you listen to the central server. Then they can do analysis of the collective data to make associations and recommendations. Sounds cool. Gotta try it out.

Felix was also making a more meta point which was where the name of the talk came from. He’s talking about myware as a play on spyware. The idea is to “spy” on yourself in an unobtrusive manner and then use that collected information to help you sometime in the future – in this case help you find new music by spying on your music playing habits. There’s major privacy concerns of course, but the idea is pretty interesting. Something to noodle on at any rate.