One of the nice things about running your own business is that you can occasionally decide to spend a bit of time doing a bit of research into stuff you find interesting. The Normalisr is an example of this - an application that I built to reflect some of my ideas on attention data and what could be measured in last.fm listening charts.
06 November 2009 | Add the first comment | Technology & applications
Hooray! It's live! Your all-new "Normalisr" experience can now boast the following improvements:
We hope you enjoy it. If you have any questions, feedback or issues to report, please use the feedback form.
03 October 2009 | Add the first comment | Technology & applications
After months of neglect, we've finally got round to working on an update to our last.fm normaliser application. We've decided to build the whole thing from the ground up using Python/Django, our new favourite toys. Version two will hopefully include the following improvements:
Anyway, some work in progress screenshots below.
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26 August 2009 | 3 comments | Technology & applications
...you watch a video by the next big thing in pop music and concentrate on the gadget rather than the fetching young lady or the tune.
09 January 2009 | Add the first comment | Technology & applications
"When you blow something up by a factor of one hundred, it gets weaker by a factor of one hundred. If you try to build a cathedral that way, it just collapses into a pile of rubble." - Alan Kay
Having spent time as both a "Software Engineer" and a Structural Engineer, I am always interested when key industry figures start comparing the two disciplines. Alan Kay's insight into one of the fundamental problems with software reminded me of the arguments over the use of the word "Engineering" for software.
18 November 2008 | 5 comments | Technology & applications
Our last.fm normaliser application recently celebrated its first birthday, and we're pretty pleased that not only has it lasted this long, but it still seems to be going strong. In that year, it has served up over a quarter of a million charts and now has over 215,000 albums in its cache.
It has been very interesting to compare usage with coverage - while most of our referrals come from last.fm itself, this article in Read Write Web, a link from Tom Coates and the launch of last.fm's directory of external applications all provided some welcome spikes in traffic.
04 July 2008 | Add the first comment | Technology & applications
Read Write Web has just published an interesting summary piece about the semantic web, that predicts the eventual demise of relational databases in favour of "structure on the fly" searching.
17 February 2008 | Add the first comment | Technology & applications
We've just knocked together a stats page for our last.fm normaliser application, that rejigs your charts based on an estimate of how long you have actually spent listening.
25 January 2008 | Add the first comment | Technology & applications
I have just published a little application that grabs the top 50 artists from your Last.fm profile and searches for the latests news about them from Google News. The results are produced in RSS format.
02 November 2007 | 3 comments | Technology & applications
After much head-scratching and a few hairy moments with the database this afternoon, we have updated the Last.fm Normaliser to use median track length values in its calculations, rather than the arithmetic mean values used previously.
Hopefully, this should smooth out a lot of the issues people were reporting with a handful of extra-long or extra-short tracks skewing the figures for a particular artist or album.
02 July 2007 | 47 comments | Technology & applications
