Week 9 of Learn 2.0

The video for this week was fun. I really like the idea of people spontaneously bursting into song in the library! It never happens in real life like it does in musicals, and I have to wonder how many of the people in the library were actually prepped for what was happening.

Copyright is a huge issue right now with the internet. I know I used to get a lot of articles ILLed in college when the full text wasn't available online for use in writing papers, so I'm familiar with the librarian copywright scenarios. But with music? Even with the handy example guidelines in the course links, it seems like in some circumstances, there's still a lot of gray area to be considered. When is it okay? Better not to chance it, I guess. But that doesn't stop some of our patrons who check out 30 CDs and return them the next day. You know what they're doing (and maybe even do it yourself). We trespass people for doing it on library computers, but no one can control what you do from home except yourself (and possibly the RIAA police). But that's where DRM comes in, saving you from the trouble of controlling yourself. In some cases, it's better to be too safe (and not even be able to listen to music purchased) than not safe enough (and have yor music poached online) according to big music labels. But Steve Job's open letter exposes some cracks in the veneer, such as DRM only being required on digital music, but not CDs. When it's just as easy to circumvent the whole process by copying a CD instead of buying albums online, why attempt to control one so much more strictly than the other? With Europe being (apparently) the most affected in terms of not even being able to access purchased music, it's a little surprising that the clamor for attention to this hypocrisy hasn't already led to DRM's demise. I understand that there needs to be some kind of watchfulness by producers of content (I'm not quite ready to condone the open source free-for-all plan yet), but obviously DRM is not the way to go. There will always be someone ready to hack any system, but there's got to be some method of ensuring that artists don't go broke (though it seems like the labels are the ones bleeding them dry, not listeners who pirate) without making it so hard just to listen.

In terms of music recommendations, I didn't really like LivePlasma, which I had already looked at for a previous week. I like that it links to the artist's amazon listing, but the format is too busy looking for me, whereas Music-Map was much simpler and easier to see (even if the artists jiggle and overlap a little too much sometimes, making them hard to differentiate). Music-Map is part of GNOD , which has been linked on the "Children and Teens" section of our own website for a long time. My favorite, though, was UpTo11, which is easy to use, presents everything in a format that is colorful, detailed, and simple to understand. You can even set the ranking of artists recommended to you from popular to not-well-known, depending on how generic you want your results to be. I also really like Last.FM, whose radio function some of my friends use at work to get varied tunes all day. The music it played in conjunction with my preferences was all really cool, and over time, if I "love" or "reject" enough songs, it will be tailored even more specifically. I have not yet had the program sift through my music files at home, but I think that it would be equally good in that regard. One problem I had was that sometimes the music freezes for a few seconds (on some songs more than others, and I wonder if running the program on a better computer would fix the issue) before resuming, interrupting the flow. Also, as far as I can tell, there's no way to go back and look at the music it's played before. I understand not being able to play past songs again, but just a list would be nice, in case I spaced out and don't remember who was playing, or I would like to tag a previous song as one I liked a lot. I've been having some trouble activating my account with MyStrands, so I can't really say much about it, but it seems like a really neat, collaborative program. As a side note, I really liked staff member Emily's music a lot; it reminded me of Nellie McKay, such great piano and voice, maybe I'll hit her show at Infusion next week!

For the Adventure activity, I visited SpringWidgets, where I found widgets that looked good, but didn't offer much variety. On the other hand, YourMinis offered a lot of different varieties of widgets, but they didn't look as professional, or they made my blog run too slowly because they were so complicated to load. In the end, I settled on having the weather displayed on the bottom left of my page from YourMinis. It's useful information, I could pick the color I wanted it to be, and it looks good. The only problem is that it's a little too long for the sidebar on my blog, so you can't see the weather for that last day of the 5-day forecast, and you also can't access the editing tools for the widget. But, it's okay. If only there was some way to combine the two widget pages, so that there was the variety of YourMinis with the polished look and adaptability of SpringWidgets.