Category: Community

Yesterday at the Santa Barbara Forum on Digital Transitions, I had a chance to pick Clay Shriky’s brain about online consensus and what it means to bring about consensus in an online community. We didn’t come up with much revolutionary other than what we’ve already been doing: Watch a lively discussion (perhaps flame war) arise and subside. Then pick through the rubble to see if something akin to a consensus was found. If so, great. If not, wait a little while and ask the same question over while framing it better in light of the last discussion. Repeat as necessary and involve evil overlord as last resort.

Clay did share a quote from David Clark that was very fitting to our discussion:

“We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”

While its not perfect, it does show what we do about 98% of the time.

P.S. I was video blogged too — take a look: I won’t stand still while enthusiastically spouting off about MusicBrainz.

Technorati Tags: musicbrainz, quote

The next MusicBrainz meeting will be in London, this saturday evening:

• Where: Old Thameside Inn (map)
• When: Saturday May 7th, 6pm
• Who: You!
• Why: It is fun meeting other brainerz

I will probably show up at 5pm, if not earlier, to try and set aside some space for us. Anyone who wants to come a bit early and help me set aside space would be welcome! If you’re interesting in making it and would like to get my mobile #, please drop me a line and I’ll mail it to you.

See you there!

The meeting in A’dam is on for tomorrow:

• Where: In front of the Dam Monument, facing the Palace
• When: 19:00
• What: Chat about MusicBrainz, have a beer
• Who: Anyone who can make it

Send me mail and I will send you my mobile # so we can make sure to hook up. If its raining, lets meet in front of Hotel Krasnapolsky.

I will be making a trip to Europe and as part of that I like to go and visit MusicBrainz contributors/fans in lots of places. This time around, I’ll be making the stops listed below. If you’d like to come join me to have a beer or dinner or whatever, please post a comment here and we’ll work out the details:

• Karlsruhe, Germany: May 1st
• Amsterdam, Netherlands: May 3rd
• London, United Kingdom: May 7th

Let’s meet up, have a beer and talk about MusicBrainz!

The Wall Street Journal mentioned MusicBrainz in an article on music metadata today. While talking about using acoustic fingerprints to identify music they write:

MusicBrainz offers a program called MusicBrainz Tagger that uses this method, and Gracenote expects its software partners to broadly roll out a similar Gracenote technology this year. You have to download special software for this system to work on your PC.

(reprinted without permission and in fear of the WSJ striking me down)

I’m glad to see that Gracenote is still playing catch-up with MusicBrainz. Somewhat ironic, isn’t it?

Nikki and I are randomly hacking on MusicBrainz when I became curious about the distribution about brainzers around the world. One SQL query later we have:

country | count

———+——-

fr | 1664

de | 1498

uk | 1031

dk | 746

ru | 670

nl | 454

pl | 409

ca | 348

au | 271

it | 270

This is compiled from email addresses of registered users that use their country top level domains. This obviously cuts out all the .net, .com, .org addresses, which is a lot of people. But this gives a decent idea of the reach that MusicBrainz has into the nooks and crannies of the planet. It turns out that we have members from 105 countries, which if we’re counting 238 country tlds, that comes to 44%. Wow!

Read on for the complete list…

Continue reading “Brainzers around the world”

Kim Plowright from the BBC was kind enough to invite me to speak to the BBC about online communities and MusicBrainz. The presentation went well and the question and answer session allowed us (Dave Evans, RJ@AudioScrobbler, Russ@AudioScrobbler and myself were in attendance) meet some of the BBC folks. Dan Hill from the BBC even asked me how the Advance Relationship work was going — I was expecting all kinds of questions, but I was surprised by that one.

Here are the presentation slides I used.

Here is one picture I took from Pub Night:

Going from left to right: rjmunro, michael@last.fm, zerogravitas, rj@audioscrobbler, russ@last.fm, kass@bbc, djve, Paul Sharpe, gavinclarke, cikkolata, somniloquy