[Sigia-l] Findability

[Laura Norvig]

I was partially responding to your assertion that "free" was the best 
part. I think "free" was almost incidental - the appeal lay in so 
many other things, and the fact that no alternative existed, because 
the traditional music industry didn't, and still doesn't, have a clue 
as to how to offer something comparable while respecting some modicum 
of copyright and getting artists and writers their due compensation.

One of the key appeals was the sense of connecting with a community 
of listeners.

Search in Napster worked well enough (until the lawsuits caused 
uploaders to bastardize the spelling of popular artists and songs) 
that I did not miss categorization. Music categorization is fraught 
with difficulty anyway. Where are the lines between "alt-country" 
"folk" "americana"? What category would you put someone like Ben 
Harper in? Eclectic artists suffer un-findability. I'm not saying 
categorization isn't useful for some types of users, but most 
discerning listeners know what artists they're looking for - they get 
recommendations for new stuff from friends, not from browsing 
categories.

I don't use Napster anymore because it doesn't really exist, does it? 
I don't know if Kaazaa has this feature.

-Laura

>"Laura Norvig" wrote:
>
>
>>  I thought the coolest (most pleasurable and useful?) thing about
>>  Napster was when I found a song I liked and then was able to browse
>>  the library of the person who had that song. Many wonderful
>>  serendipitous expansions of my musical tastes were the result.
>
>Interesting point Laura. I had to go back and make sure I had 
>mentioned that Napster did allow for some, limited
>browsing.
>
>That feature is a 'primitive' (or 'pure' I suppose) version of 
>collaborative filtering, which was the technology I
>alluded to as an example of browsing without predetermined categories.
>
>But let me ask you this -- since the portion of my post you 
>responded to had more to do with the "free" aspect of the
>Napster resources:
>
>Did you really mean you thought that browsing other people's 
>collections was the "most" pleasurable/useful aspect? If
>so, are you still using that aspect of Napster? Why not?
>
>-cc
>