Author: JP

Some of you have asked me to share my reading habits with you, so here’s my current ten-in-parallel:

The Black Swan: Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fascinating, eminently readable, gentle and easy and unusual. Second pass.

Science, Faith and Society: Michael Polanyi: My regular Polanyi “fix”. Not for the faint-hearted. Third pass.

Comedy by the Numbers: Hoffman and Rudoren. A little bit of McSweeney’s goes a long way. Oddball but fun. First time.

The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Elizabeth Eisenstein. A giant of a book, my third read through. A must.

The Accidental Investment Banker: Jonathan Knee.  I like accidents. Not yet started it.

Blood Thirsty: Marshall Karp. I loved The Rabbit Factory, so I thought I’d try Karp again. Unread.

What’s So Funny? Donald E Westlake. I’m fanatical about Westlake, particularly the Dortmunder series. Unmissable.

Crooked Little Vein: Warren Ellis. Trying him out, just because William Gibson said it was worth it. Unread.

Silence: Thomas Perry. I’d walk a mile for a new Thomas Perry. Ten miles. As with Westlake, I’ve been a fan for decades.

Bad Monkeys: Matt Ruff.  I judged this book by its cover. Never heard of him, but liked Christopher Moore’s comments.

I guess I was younger and more hot-headed not that long ago; I remember being quite irritated when I heard that Microsoft had bought MongoMusic, as reported here. Until that happened, I’d nurtured real belief that we were on the verge of a breakthrough related to search, albeit rooted in music in the first instance.

Some of you may be aware of Shazam, particularly if you live in the UK. It’s a great service, you use your mobile phone to call them, stick the device near where there’s some music playing, the service samples the sound for 10 seconds and then texts you with details of the track and artist and so on. I love it, because it solves a simple and common problem for me. Say I’m in a car, listening to the radio, and there’s a song playing that I’ve never heard before, but that I like. Now I tend to listen to radio stations with very little talking, so what used to happen was that I was out of the car long before anyone announced what the particular song was. With Shazam, I could find out. Most of the time.

What MongoMusic tried to do went one step beyond Shazam; Shazam could only deal with formal recorded sound, “official” tracks. MongoMusic had a Sounds Like facility that allowed you to sing or hum or whistle the tune, and it would try and match it. So Shazam looked for exact matches, while MongoMusic looked for patterns, the sort of distinction that’s been driving image recognition experts crazy for some years now (in terms of database size and seek time and accuracy).

That was then. Now, reading a post in Smart Mobs, I see green shoots of recovery.  Take a look at this: Sing To Your Computer to Find Music, as reported by Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends, quoting Dr Sandra UitdenBogerd.

I look forward to hearing more, and to keeping all of you posted. I tend to think that this is really where search needs to head: where I can say Sounds Like or Looks Like or Feels Like or Tastes Like or It’s Somehow A Bit Like, and get a set of options to narrow down to what I want. I guess it’s what IdentiKit experts are used to doing.

Once we have something like that, imagine how we could help design things for customers. Identikit design backed by multimedia “It’s Like …” search.

I’m a web 2.0 enthusiast; more particularly, I’m an enterprise 2.0 enthusiast, I guess; I’m sure some of you are as well.

Not everyone thinks the way we do. Which is why seeing videos like this one will help keep us honest and sane. My thanks to Nick Kings for the heads-up.

Incidentally, you can see the shape of things to come at the bottom of the Glumbert video “screen”. It says Send To A Friend. Digg This. Stumble It. Share On Facebook. Options you’re going to get used to.

I’m fascinated by comics, comedians, humourists, funny people. However you want to describe them. There’s something I feel I can always learn from them about the human condition. Which is probably why I enjoyed Not Only But Always immensely, Rhys Ifans does an incredible job of being Peter Cook. Man On The Moon was another I enjoyed tremendously,  about the life of Andy Kaufman. I still laugh whenever I watch Fawlty Towers, I’m that kind of guy.

Comics make themselves very vulnerable, it’s something about them that appeals to me. The same sort of feeling I got when I saw David Mackenzie speak before a private showing of Hallam Foe to bloggers, an openness and vulnerability that is rare.

I guess I can vicariously share in a tiny bit of that vulnerability by pointing to something offbeat that I found funny. Please humour me and go take a look at these robots fighting. As usual, also in my VodPod.