Category: General

Last week at ETech I met Ewan Spence and his buddy Crow — Ewan is a crazy Scotsman who plays with hand-puppets and feeds chocolate lover’s his imported Cadbury chocolate (the dodgy US Cadbury just won’t do!). When he is not foisting chocolate on unsuspecting attendees he’s often found recoding podcasts. After lunch one day he cornered me to talk about MusicBrainz a bit — I wasn’t quite mentally prepared to be facing a microphone, so I sound like a complete dumbass at the beginning, but I manage to catch my stride further into the podcast.

Check it out at the Podcastnetwork’s “The Tech Conference Show“. The MusicBrainz segment starts at 17:05 into the recording.

I really removed trackback support from this blog (the trackback cgi is not executable anymore — take that!). I also removed all the trackback links from the templates…

Thus, no more trackbacks which is sad, but no more spam, which is good.

Great news folks! We just purchased two new servers:

• Dual 2.4Ghz Xeon Supermicro 1U servers
• 4GB RAM
• SCSI III support
• 1 server has 1 72GB hot swap drives and the other has 2

Each one was a whopping $950 — a really awesome deal! Now I need to purchase a RAID controller and we can give the TRM server its own machine, which should alleviate some of the bottlenecks we’ve been seeing.

Jamie Munro suggested looking into purchasing the mb.org domain, so I put in a (joking) offer of $50. The owner replied telling me that he paid over 20 times that and that he would not go for it. No surprise there. So, next time we have $1000 to splurge on a nice shortcut domain, we could consider doing this.

Thus, chances of this happening are next to nil. At least we tried. 🙂

The last two weeks were pretty much dedicated to trying to make ends meet. Fortunately I managed to get some contract work that paid fairly well and was somewhat related to my spare time projects like MusicBrainz and XSPF. In the last two weeks I managed to earn 1/4 of what I earned all of last year. That speaks highly of the last two weeks and poorly on the last year.

The upshot is that I have time to get back to MusicBrainz hacking. That means I’m back on the project that won’t die: Advanced Relationships. Every time I think I am done, someone points out 2-3 new problems that set me back another week. Its been like this since the end of December, and its getting a bit frustrating. The positive thing about this is that I’m doing AR right — no ‘lets put this out there and we’ll make if work really well later‘. Besides, every-time I’ve half-assed a feature on the server, everyone has always let me know what they think, and its never pretty. 🙂

Continue reading “Back to Advanced Relationships I trudge…”

I think that Wikipedia and MusicBrainz have a lot in common — we differ in scope and how we collect data, (unstructured vs structured, respectively) but the overall approach of collecting data from volunteers is pretty much the same. Both projects rely on a set of guidelines to guide it’s self-selected contributors in the right direction. One major difference is that MusicBrainz has a peer review system embodied by our often discussed and much tweaked voting system. Larry Sanger, the co-founder of WIkipedia singles out the lack of a peer-review system in Wikipedia as it’s greatest flaw:

Second, my view is that Wikipedia badly needs a review process which the general public can regard as reliable. I personally made several different proposals of such review processes, and shortly before I left the project permanently, I was working on such a proposal. The Wikipedia community, like any large online community, is a pretty “political” place, however, and so I do not have the time or patience to try to organize a review process now.

. . .

A free, open encyclopedia that is reviewed has always been my vision for Wikipedia (and for its parent project, the currently-moribund Nupedia). From before the time that I left, I personally have regarded it as a serious failing of the project that it does not have a publicly credible review process.

In the past I’ve suggested a wiki style approach to moderation at MusicBrainz and the community has pushed back on that idea for many of the same reasons. In retrospect, I am glad that we have a peer review process in place — the voting system has taken a lot of our time (both using it and creating/maintaining it) but I think MusicBrainz is better off because of it. That’s not to say that we’re done tinkering with it — far from it. I wonder how difficult it will be for Wikipedia to bolt a review system on top of it’s wiki, should they decide to do it — that is a major challenge!

Then, Larry points out another problem with Wikipedia:

First, Wikipedia is, at present, of uneven reliability. Some articles have only recently been started; some have never received the attention of anything like an expert; some (fewer) have been degraded from superior earlier versions. This imperfect reliability is something that Wikipedia itself makes no secret of, particularly in its “General disclaimer.” I personally share the view of many that Wikipedia should not be used as a single source of information for anything. Defenders sometimes add that this is true of all sources of information, which is true, as far as it goes.

To a degree, this is true of MusicBrainz as well. However, I don’t consider this to be a problem — I consider this to be a fact of life. There is so much music and increasingly more is created every day, which means that MusicBrainz will always be behind in cataloging it all. Also, MusicBrainz will never be completely correct — there will always be mistakes. We will certainly aim to be more complete as time progresses, but it is a limit function — MusicBrainz will never be complete or totally correct. But, is that really a problem?

I don’t think so.

UPDATE: Clay Shirky has a great response to Larry’s article.

I was curious how our PayPal donations stacked up over time, so I downloaded our history and stuffed it into Excel and had it draw a pretty graph:

Please note that this does not include donations received outside of PayPal (most notably $1200 from Paul Sharpe). Also, the December 2004 figures only include donations received before December 19, when we switched over to accepting donations via the new MetaBrainz PayPal account.

I know, I know, I know. Captchas discriminate against vision impaired people.

Regardless, I have installed comment captchas (little images that contain a number you need to type in) as a comment spam blocking solution. Its worked well on my other blog, and I hope it will work well here. I’ve not gone back to all the entries to make sure that all comments are turned on, but they should be for all new posts.

Let’s hope this works.

I had a really great time in Europe (Spain and Britain) in the last couple of weeks. Now I’ve returned to the states, cleaned up my travel gear and I’m trying to convince my body to get over the jet-lag and prepare for getting back to work tomorrow.

The MusicBrainz Pub Night was a success, if I say so myself. We ended up settling on the third pub in the list: Old Thameside. At its peak we had 14 people present, which is a record for getting Brainzerz together in one room. I really enjoyed meeting people face-to-face, espousing the virtues of MusicBrainz and getting people fired up about contributing.

We had a great number of conversations throughout the evening, but we mainly avoided plotting grand new schemes that we wouldn’t have time to implement. We did talk quite a bit about the new non-profit, AdvancedRelationships and our perennial problem of reducing the number of open moderations. We all had a good laugh at the last one — no matter what we do, it seems that open moderations tends to hover around 4000-5000 open moderations.

I really hope that in the coming year we can tackle a number of the things are we’re hoping to work on, so that we can have another full fledged summit towards the end of next year.

Thanks to everyone who showed up to the pub night — it was a really fun evening!