Dataphilia

I think way too much about Last.fm. I spend way too much time ogling my page there, watching my stats rack up and seeing how the data paints a picture of my listening habits (and consequently thinking about how you cannot observe something without altering it).

The people who run Last.fm have been making some great improvments to the site recently, cleaning up the design and adding some features. I love the events feature (my events), and the newly-added Flickr integration means that I can tag my photos with a unique Last.fm event ID and have my photos show up on that event's page. Of course, this can't happen until the event is over. But they encourage users to write event reviews, and have given past events enough page-time that I'm noticing people coming back and commenting on past events. Example: the page for this show (Xiu Xiu/Shearwater/Casiotone FPO). They've also got pages for venues and links to related Flickr photos for those as well.

I'm intrigued by the idea of having a record of every show I go to, with links to every photo I take there, in addition to data on every iTunes and iPod play I make. I'm also finding myself using Last.fm as a reference when I want to find out about an artist--the wiki-based biographical info on each artist, while a work in progress, is handy. Combine that with democratically-determined artist photos, event info, user and track data, album tracklistings and song previews, similar artists, charts, tags, journal mentions--it's a remarkably rich resource. I can't get enough.