James Wheare’s Blog | jouire.com

How legislation is killing the content industries

2010-04-09T00:00:00+01:00

P2P networks have done more to solve the problem of illegal filesharing than legislation ever will. Without Napster, Grokster and co. it’s arguable we wouldn’t have the likes of the iTunes Music Store, Netflix or Hulu as they are today. Cheap, comprehensive and convenient, these legitimate services built on the successful interaction models of popular P2P software and point to a future in which illegal downloading is largely redundant.

Like any other, the business of entertainment distribution is a creature sensitive to market forces. In this market, filesharing networks emerged as competitors to retail channels the content industries had traditionally relied upon. Certainly, the incumbents fought them tooth and nail in the courts, and found a slew of specific targets on which to sharpen their legislative arsenal. But the surging interest in filesharing technology had already profoundly disrupted the market.

Buoyed by confrontation with a powerful enemy—and crucially learning from their skirmishes on the digital frontier—the record companies turned to Apple, who gladly stepped in to fulfil the undeniable consumer demand. And the movie and television studios soon followed suit.

An uneasy truce

In the seven years since the iTunes Music Store launched, illegal downloading has been driven underground, confined to the barren and joyless no man’s land of BitTorrent, and the war against filesharing has largely stagnated to the level of a border dispute. The powerful incumbents have again grown lazy, self-satisfied and complacent, and as a result progress too has stagnated. Time then for a revitalising boost to innovation? Perhaps not.

Yesterday, the UK Digital Economy Bill went through the last stages of Parliamentary scrutiny and passed into law as an Act of Parliament. In the final hours of the last parliamentary session before a general election, both major parties forced through legislation that gives content owners unprecedented powers to go after individuals to secure their legal rights online.

But why shouldn’t our “creative industries” be given the power to protect their valuable copyright? Perhaps they should, but this law has been implemented in a way that favours companies too strongly over people, overemphasises the threat, and—more concerning for those industries—it’s a short-sighted move that threatens their business in the long run. Not only is it abhorrent to individuals, it just makes bad business sense.

This act is an attempt to eradicate the most valuable motivation for progress in the future of digital distribution.

Legislation is a necessary weapon of progress and it can be a valuable stabilising force for businesses, but the targets thus far have been specific, named organisations. This act seemingly codifies a blanket attack on “any location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright.” [source]

Such vague and arse-covering terms are worrying, and the fact that it was forced into law by three line whip, under apparent pressure from the BPI, and with the customary lack of scrutiny of the wash-up period has left many baffled as to the state of our democracy.

“Test-beds of innovation”

It doesn’t really look like the government is on our side. But what do they have to say?

The space the legislation provides to develop those models will be important. But rights holders must get a move on. Legislation is not the whole solution to the problems. Rights holders need to develop new ways to make content available to people in formats that they want and at a fair price – reducing the incentive to break the law. Progress has been much too slow.
Speech by Stephen Timms MP, Minister for Digital Britain, Oxford Media Convention, Thursday January 21, 2010

This is the standard counterpoint that’s been touted since the original Digital Britain report was published last year. Here’s Lord Carter—the report’s author, since retired from UK politics—trying to put it another way in June 2009.

If you’re impatient, skip to 3:12 for a spiel on the importance of new business models and the proposed government “test beds of innovation.”

The “little bit of prime funding from government” he refers to is a £10 million investment from the Technology Strategy Board towards a broadband network designed specifically for trialling new monetization systems, rights models and personal security mechanisms. Details on what exactly this means are scant, but Chapter 4 of the Digital Britain report (PDF) offers some rationale, starting at section 72 on page 19 of the PDF.

The contract to set up this infrastructure will likely be awarded in the next few months, and more details may then emerge, but from what I’ve read there’s an awful lot of emphasis on micropayment and centralised billing structures and not a word on consumer experience.

This is an opportunity.

Why I don't like Carcassonne

2010-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

This morning, just before I woke from a dream, I was asked why I don’t like the board game Carcassonne. Truth is, I’ve never played it, but I’m not particularly interested in it. It’s not often that you’re challenged on why you don’t like something by a total stranger, so saying so is a lazy way to get out it.

But this chap challenged me on my opinion, and that’s a game I do like. I talk a lot of shit most of the time, mostly so I can look at what I think from a different perspective than inside my brain. It’s a way of testing out ideas. If they can withstand public scrutiny I’m vindicated, if not I get to change my mind. Being challenged is an opportunity to clarify what I think. Trouble is this comes across as trolling, and people have learnt not to feed the troll, or they’re too polite to interject or just not sure enough of their own opinions.

Photo from Wikipedia Licensed CC-BY-SA

So why don’t I like Carcassonne? Or the challenges of board games in general—in my dream Carcassonne wasn’t anything like the actual game, and serves better as a proxy for all games of its sort. And in fact, some of these complaints probably don’t even apply to Carcassonne.

Non-representational: I like to look for patterns in things. This is easier when they’re self-evident. Board games tend to rely heavily on abstraction to keep gameplay simple and focused. Carcassonne is a very stylised approximation of the idea of fortified cities, but breaks the suspension of disbelief in favour of the game mechanic.

Investment of time: I’m pretty impatient, and it takes too long to learn how to play a new board game. This alone isn’t such a big deal—most things worth doing take time to master—but board games don’t have the same level progression you’d find in most modern video games. There’s often no steady development of skills, you’re just thrown in at the deep end with all the other players. This helps replayability, and is arguably more fun for the experts who just want to get cracking, but it’s toxic to noobs. Also, they take too long to set up and play out.

Harsh defeat-state: Arguably this is also true of multiplayer modes in video games, but board games are missing the checkpoint reloads that make dying in an FPS easier to bear (up to a point). Combined with how long it can take to rise out of noobdom, this can be pretty dispiriting. This is more true of some board games than others; I’ve never been very good at Chess, and most of the time the people who ask for a game know what they’re doing. Some people take intellectual reward from losing at Chess, by analysing the mistakes that led to their defeat. I don’t.

No safety-net: Often these games can seem intolerant of mistakes, another mark of a steep learning curve. It’s frustrating to invest a lot of energy in a long board game only to have it all whipped away from you by a schoolboy error. This is also fatal for turn-based games, where the fear of fucking up leads to indecision, and bored opponents. This is why I’ve lost interest in Scrabble.

Human opponents: Yes you can play board games as a team, but you’re still competing against other friends. I much prefer cooperative games with a shared common enemy that’s preferably controlled by a machine, or someone I don’t have to empathise with. Like a rival school.

Popularity: I’m often deeply suspicious of things that are popular, just as I am of the outrage directed at something universally unpopular. It can often be hard to distinguish between a game having a fan base and having fan boys. This is pretty off-putting, as it’s easy to conflate admiration for lazy judgment and a lack of critical thought. Also these games are often popular because they’re clever and this seems like a cheap trick to disguise something that’s not fun.

Complexity: I like things that are simple to grasp. Board games have too many rules, and too many edges for you to stumble on, only to suffer at the hands of the experts who learnt them long ago.

These are some of my hang-ups, and I’m mainly exposing them here as a mind hack to see if they withstand public scrutiny. I’m pretty sure there are glaring flaws in my reasoning; people obviously play and enjoy these games, and I’m hoping they can change my mind. Vindication is overrated.

UK Government consultation for free geodata

2010-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Government have launched a consultation on how to make Ordnance Survey data free with no restrictions on reuse. You can read the consultation here (pdf), and can use this form to submit what you think about it.
osconsult.ernestmarples.com

A new website by the team behind Ernest Marples encourages you to have your say on this Government proposal which ends on Wednesday 17 March 2010.

The proposal is long, detailed and typically waffly. The Government are asking for feedback on 12 specific questions (search for “List of consultation questions” in the PDF) but also welcome any general comments about making geospatial data more available in the UK.

You can either respond via osconsult.ernestmarples.com or email the Government directly: giconsultation@communities.gsi.gov.uk

Here’s my response:

Geodata for Digital Britain

The barrier to entry for building useful applications that improve our daily lives is no longer technological, nor is it financial. Today, given talent and motivation, the tools needed to launch such applications are cheaply and readily available. Open source software, commodity hardware and cheap bandwidth have allowed those with time and passion to build services that once required huge budgets and complex contractual agreements.

In this context, geospatial data is a crucial asset in the march towards an engaged and innovative society. It brings valuable context to other datasources, and–amongst other uses–can enable more efficient use of transport systems (livebus.org), a fairer housing market (mapumental.com) and a faster response to local problems (fixmystreet.com)

FixMyStreet uses licensed Ordnance Survey data but the ideas behind it could only have sprung up within the recent climate of geospatial thinking encouraged by Google’s democratisation of maps. Creative and motivated individuals are now putting their efforts into thinking about the geographic context, its uses for society, and its benefits for the economy. This trend needs to be supported by available data. None of the above services could exist without it.

For data to be available to individuals, it needs to be cheap, downloadable, reusable, and come with clear and permissive terms for non-commercial use.

The government should be encouraging Ordnance Survey, Royal Mail, and others who control such data, to think about licensing structures that allow individuals to make a difference to our lives. Paid licenses are of course valuable for the commercial sector, but creative citizens with ideas and a social conscience should be provided with the opportunity to compete. They have after all proven to be far more innovative and productive than many of the largest corporations.

Digital Britain should be about more than just benefitting big business. Let’s think of citizens too.

Contemporary friendship

2010-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Following on from yesterday’s post, I read another long Deresiewicz piece published last month entitled Faux Friendship. Again, here are some choice extracts:

We have yet to find a satisfactory name for that period of life, now typically a decade but often a great deal longer, between the end of adolescence and the making of definitive life choices. But the one thing we know is that friendship is absolutely central to it.

At the start of this period of my own life, I find myself reflecting on the quality and nature of my own relationships. Deresiewicz first looks at how far we’ve erred from Classical ideals of friendship.

Between the rise of Freudianism and the contemporaneous emergence of homosexuality to social visibility, we’ve taught ourselves to shun expressions of intense affection between friends—male friends in particular, though even Oprah was forced to defend her relationship with her closest friend—and have rewritten historical friendships, like Achilles’ with Patroclus, as sexual. For all the talk of “bromance” lately (or “man dates”), the term is yet another device to manage the sexual anxiety kicked up by straight-male friendships—whether in the friends themselves or in the people around them—and the typical bromance plot instructs the callow bonds of youth to give way to mature heterosexual relationships. At best, intense friendships are something we’re expected to grow out of.

[…]

We have ceased to believe that a friend’s highest purpose is to summon us to the good by offering moral advice and correction. We practice, instead, the nonjudgmental friendship of unconditional acceptance and support—“therapeutic” friendship […] We seem to be terribly fragile now. A friend fulfills her duty, we suppose, by taking our side—validating our feelings, supporting our decisions, helping us to feel good about ourselves. We tell white lies, make excuses when a friend does something wrong, do what we can to keep the boat steady. We’re busy people; we want our friendships fun and friction-free.

He goes on to expand again on the changing value of solitude in this ever-connected present:

We have always shared our little private observations and moments of feeling—it’s part of what friendship’s about, part of the way we remain present in one another’s lives—but things are different now. Until a few years ago, you could share your thoughts with only one friend at a time (on the phone, say), or maybe with a small group, later, in person. And when you did, you were talking to specific people, and you tailored what you said, and how you said it, to who they were—their interests, their personalities, most of all, your degree of mutual intimacy. “Reach out and touch someone” meant someone in particular, someone you were actually thinking about. It meant having a conversation. Now we’re just broadcasting our stream of consciousness […] to all 500 of our friends at once, hoping that someone, anyone, will confirm our existence by answering back. We haven’t just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.

[…]

Friendship […] has been smoothly integrated into our new electronic lifestyles. We’re too busy to spare our friends more time than it takes to send a text. We’re too busy, sending texts. And what happens when we do find the time to get together? I asked a woman I know whether her teenage daughters and their friends still have the kind of intense friendships that kids once did. Yes, she said, but they go about them differently. They still stay up talking in their rooms, but they’re also online with three other friends, and texting with another three. Video chatting is more intimate, in theory, than speaking on the phone, but not if you’re doing it with four people at once. And teenagers are just an early version of the rest of us. A study found that one American in four reported having no close confidants, up from one in 10 in 1985. The figures date from 2004, and there’s little doubt that Facebook and texting and all the rest of it have already exacerbated the situation. The more people we know, the lonelier we get.

Now I don’t fully buy that we’ve moved wholesale from private intimate relationships to the bulk-scale friend networking that Deresiewicz describes. But Facebook and Twitter have brought us economies of social scale, and it’s a landscape we’ll have to navigate carefully to avoid losing ourselves in the stream.

He ends the piece on this depressing note:

A recent book on the sociology of modern science describes a networking event at a West Coast university: “There do not seem to be any singletons—disconsolately lurking at the margins—nor do dyads appear, except fleetingly.” No solitude, no friendship, no space for refusal—the exact contemporary paradigm. At the same time, the author assures us, “face time” is valued in this “community” as a “high-bandwidth interaction,” offering “unusual capacity for interruption, repair, feedback and learning.” Actual human contact, rendered “unusual” and weighed by the values of a systems engineer. We have given our hearts to machines, and now we are turning into machines. The face of friendship in the new century.

I don’t agree with a lot of the black and white false dichotomies presented in this essay, but these passages certainly resonate and bring pause to thought.

Let’s take better care of our friends. They keep us sane.

Losing the ability to be alone

2010-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

I just read The End of Solitude (January 2009) – an essay by William Deresiewicz that examines two sources of emotional ennui unique to the modern age: boredom and loneliness.

It’s a long piece, but here’s the chunk that struck me most:

There is an analogy, it seems to me, with the previous generation’s experience of boredom. The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citations of either word, at least in the contemporary sense, date from the 19th century. Suburbanization, by eliminating the stimulation as well as the sociability of urban or traditional village life, exacerbated the tendency to both. But the great age of boredom, I believe, came in with television, precisely because television was designed to palliate that feeling. Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state. Television, by obviating the need to learn how to make use of one’s lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored — so you turn on the television.

I speak from experience. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the age of television. I was trained to be bored; boredom was cultivated within me like a precious crop. (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.) It took me years to discover — and my nervous system will never fully adjust to this idea; I still have to fight against boredom, am permanently damaged in this respect — that having nothing to do doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The alternative to boredom is what Whitman called idleness: a passive receptivity to the world.

So it is with the current generation’s experience of being alone. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn’t call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn’t always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn’t always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.

Since leaving a job at Last.fm, I’m spending a great deal of time alone. Without formal employment, my waking hours are malleable and my working habits ad-hoc. I’m not working in an office, and I live far enough away from my social hub that going out is an effort. And it’s an effort I’m less eager to make because I’ve grown used to my solitude.

I’ve always enjoyed my own company, and freedom has made me more productive. But I’m not really alone.

I’m still plugged in to the social hub—remotely. I rely more on glancing contact. Growl, menubar notifiers, IRC highlights, an ever present IM contact list.

Google Reader | Twitterific | GMail | Facebook

Any one of the above flickering to life triggers an urgent reaction. I’m snacking on human contact all day. I haven’t read a book for months. I read that essay though. I can’t sit still for long enough to write this blog post. I copy/paste instead.

I am the modern man.

Towards a web of music

2009-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

My last post on Playdar was a little misleading. Playdar isn’t really a browser. It’s more of a search engine. But can you imagine using a web browser today that didn’t have Google built in? The idea of a browser goes hand in hand with that of a search engine; in my efforts to relate the two I may have blurred the waters.

I’d like to talk a bit more about what the web looks like today, and how we can make it friendlier to the idea of a music browser.

The substance of the web

Whether you’re searching, browsing, subscribing, sharing, discussing, listing or rating the stuff of the web, the fundamental building material and currency remains the same. The hyperlink.

On the web, links are our frames of reference, our scaffold, our signposts and our stamps of approval, and without them, we lose the ability to navigate, to reference ideas, and to lend credibility to our sources.

Links define the browsable structure of the web, and search engines work by parsing and making sense of this structure.

The limits of browsers

Part of why the web has grown so large and varied is down to the loose definition of its structure of linked URLs. HTTP defines URLs as resource identifiers; pieces of information that reference a thing and describe how to read it.

These resources can represent anything at all, and browsers interpret them according to their content type. The most common of these on the web is HTML, and through codecs, web browsers also understand MP3, FLV, JPEG, etc.

But browsers don’t really handle these secondary content types as well as they handle HTML. They don’t really need to. HTML has grown the ability to embed them. It’s the publishers who decide how images, sound and movies are presented, but they have to be snuck in under the trojan horse of markup.

HTML’s flexibility has allowed for a useful degree of creative control, but at the expense of introducing complexity that corrupts HTTP’s promise of raw content delivery. You can’t just point to material at the tip of a URL and hope that it will reach your audience. You have to serve it up with tag stew so that browsers can digest it properly.

Interop

So far, this has led to a web of control, with content centralised in the hands of publishers. The distribution of creative works is stifled, not thanks to the protective instincts of rights holders, but more as result of a careless muddling of formats. And it’s this sloppy integration of multimedia into the browser that ensures we’ll be mired in codec hell for years to come.

But we have made progress towards extracting meaning from the mess of markup. The success of RSS and Atom as syndication formats is an encouraging victory for linked data, and structured enclosures are a marked improvement for embedded media and metadata.

But can we do better? Can we create an ecosystem for browsing, subscribing, sharing, discussing, listing and rating the stuff of the web that’s separate from HTML? Music is an obvious area of opportunity, and we’ve already got music browsers that have escaped the gravitational pull of the browser. The problem is, they’re still locked into the publisher’s web of control. The iTunes Store and Spotify represent bold new ways to access a wealth of music, but they’re essentially blind to a world of sound outside their borders.

I glossed over the issue of rights before, and that’s obviously one incentive to remain walled in. A technology gatekeeper can guarantee your commercial interests are safe. But there are other solutions to licensing, commerce and rights authorisation, not just web-based but baked into desktop software.

I’d love to see a browser that treats all the music that’s on the web today as a first class citizen, with built in identification, authentication and payment systems that don’t encumber music formats directly. Only then can we rely on the universal property of the URL to link together all our activity and interest around music. Only then can we start to build a web that’s native to music.

I’d like to talk more about what the web of music might look like but I’ll leave it there for now.

Why video game movies suck

2009-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

They suck for the same reason The Phantom Menace sucked. They’re missing a protagonist.

The protagonist in a film is there to guide the audience through the plot. They’re a third party for you to identify with, cheer on, and eventually see succeed. But the player in a game is not someone who you identify with, they’re someone whose identity you assume, and the agency that affords you leaves little room for the drama you get in films.

You’ve been put into the shoes of the protagonist, but you end up directing the game’s action, rather than just acting out a small part of it. Start and Pause are your Action! and Cut!

Photo by Andrew Cooper

Well you’re actually closer to a cameraman than a director. Your job is to reveal the game designer’s story through cunning and the skilful application of your tools. Over and over again, until the game decides you’re ready to progress to the next scene. Your character is irrelevant.

A film’s audience never feel in control of the characters on screen. Dramatic tension comes from the constant reminder that good guys might fail. That’s the whole basis for suspense, and the sense of vindication you get at the happy ending. You have to believe that the protagonists can falter for it to be a relief when they don’t. You have to know that if they don’t succeed, there’d be nothing you could do to stop it.

Rather than building tension, the prospect of failure in games produces only frustration and tedium, leading to endless “restart from last checkpoint”s and “just one more go”s

And there’s little room left for a story arc. You’re put straight into the action, and it’s usually pretty unrelenting until the game ends. There’s no buildup, and no pacing, just lots and lots of shooting and a bit of levelling up.

And this is all fun, but it really doesn’t translate to cinema.

Avoiding the game movie trap

So how can filmmakers adapt games without pissing on their magic. Some games boast fabulously rich storytelling that’s ripe for adaptation.

One way might be to step away from the game’s protagonist. The best game storylines have secondary characters that are far more rich and nuanced than the player. Think Durandal or Paul Denton. Arguably, these characters are the game’s story, even if it’s usually told in terms of the player.

Ignoring the player character lets you bypass a lot of the baggage and expectations of a game, and focus on a story that can go deep. Many games go to great lengths to remove any depth from the main character, so that the player can more comfortably project their own personalities on to them, but this is suicide for movie storytelling.

Now, I suppose all this might not apply to all game genres. The dynamics of an FPS present very different challenges to a would-be filmmaker than an RPG, strategy game or puzzler might. But I think the treatment of characters, or lack thereof, is critical to the success of any adaptation, and the main character is usually not your best bet.

Playdar and a browser for the music web

2009-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Lately I’ve been working on an exciting piece of technology called Playdar. It’s downloadable software that lets you find playable sources for music content. Give it a track name and it returns a list of available MP3 URLs with ID3 tags that match (or AAC or any other format).

At the most basic level, it does this by maintaining a searchable index of your local music collection. By default, it exposes two interfaces to this index, one via an HTTP API running on localhost, and the other over a UDP listener. This lets you query the LAN for other machines running Playdar.

Here’s a slightly wonky diagram to illustrate a basic example:

A Query for a track comes in via the localhost HTTP API.
Playdar checks its local index for tracks that match Query.
One matching track is found locally.
Playdar also forwards Query to the LAN via UDP broadcast.
Another Playdar instance running on the LAN picks up the query and checks its local index for matches.
Two matching tracks are found.
It sends these matches back over UDP.
All results are combined in a JSON Response object and returned to the initial localhost request.

The resulting list of MP3s URLs all route through localhost so they can only be played by whoever made the initial request. All Playdar has done is expose an HTTP interface to the music that you already have access to, there’s no illegal file sharing going on here.

Extending Playdar

This architecture can also be extended via the resolver plugin API to search other free and legal sources of music, such as Magnatune, or Soundcloud. Here’s a list of resolvers that are available right now.

And more exciting, there’s also the possibility of working with paid subscription services like Spotify or Napster to make their content available via Playdar. If I’m paying for legal access to licensed music, I should be able to query it how I wish.

This raises a few issues in relation to the custom player that Spotify and others rely on as a DRM-protected delivery mechanism, but this could be worked around by providing an API to control the player, rather than exposing mp3 URLs directly. Indeed, Spotify already have a basic controller API with their spotify:// and http://open.spotify.com URL schemes.

What can we build?

So now we have an architecture for access to individual tracks, what can we build with this? Well, there are already a few applications out there taking advantage of Playdar, including Playgrub, a bookmarklet for extracting playlists from web pages; and my own Playlick, which lets you create playlists and syncs with other sources from the web.

Both of these use the Playdar.js client library I wrote for interfacing with the localhost API, it’s a good start if you’re building a web app to use Playdar.

Towards a Universal Playlist Parser

Both Playlick and Playgrub rely on parsers for extracting track metadata from the web, through a combination of regular expressions, DOM access and JSONP apis. There are many ways track data can be encoded: XSPF, Podcasts, custom API responses, hAudio RDF Music Ontology or just plain old HTML tag soup.

What I’d love to see is a universal parser for music data. Something along the lines of Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser that abstracts away the differences between the common metadata formats and returns data that can be treated consistently by any application that wants to use it.

This could even be exposed as a module in the Playdar API. Pass in a URL and get a structured JSON response with any parsed data from that source. Playdar so far deals very well with the atoms of music—individual songs—but still lacks tools for dealing with the wider context songs exist within—albums, playlists, charts, etc.

The music browser bit

Zed Shaw recently wrote about a “Secret Project Which Has No Name” he’s been working on that uses SPARQL to parse RDF music ontology data via JavaScript embedded in a Qt app. He’s trying to build a browser for music within its wider semantic context.

This is exactly the sort of application that could benefit from a Universal Playlist Parser, and seems to fit quite well within the Playdar ecosystem.

When I mentioned this to Zed on Twitter, he expressed concern about centralisation, no doubt because I linked to two centralised web sites that use Playdar. I hope I’ve demonstrated that the Playdar architecture itself is actually decentralised, but you’re free to build whatever you want with it, whether centralised or not.