Interesting links and notes on updates to my main website.



[to search, use Blogger search in top bar]

corporations want to help you to find great music

And by that, I mean, spy on you in order to do a better job of selling you stuff.

So in terms of music recommendation, there are two other iTunes things:
1) That "you might also like" (beta) thing built into the Music Store, which at this particular moment seems to have disappeared. Anyway the web page says The new Just For You section offers personalized recommendations. Presumably Just For You recommends based on your entire iTMS purchase history.
2) This is new: the MiniStore. The MiniStore minispies on you to guess what you might like. Ok, that's slightly but not extremely harsh. In iTunes 6.0.2 Apple has a feature - the MiniStore. That appears below your playlist. All the time. They implemented this and turned it on without fanfare and apparently without any "do you want me to turn this on" dialog box or anything. According to the net.analysis, it suggests songs by sending info on whatever song (MP3 or iTMS AAC, whatever format) you have currently clicked on (not played, just clicked on). It sends the song info to Apple and presumably it gets run through whatever recommendation engine runs iTMS.

You can turn it off. (Edit->Hide MiniStore)

Slashdot iTunes is Malware? /.
Slasdot comment RTFA and stop whining about things which aren't /.
Boing Boing iTunes update spies on your listening and sends it to Apple?

You see, corporations don't so much like users controlling their personal computers.
This was not a big deal until they had stuff to sell you online.
But now that they do... oh my, look at all that wasted user desktop/application space that could be filled with ads...

My section on music recommendation systems you actually get a choice about whether or not to use is at

http://www.akerman.ca/digimusic.html#recommend posted by Richard at 20:17 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)