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Last.fm - musical objects

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God, what a difference six months makes. I kind of forgot about last.fm and their fab audio plugin for itunes.

It's a site that is, basically a personalised, yet communal, and very public radio station, that listens to you - to throw out recommendations, tags, and personalised streaming radio stations.

Late 2004, and early this year, the site was, well, creaking under it's own popularity and the lack of investment.

I heard they've taken some money, but whatever kicked their servers in the pants, it gets my vote (and fees). The site's been massively overhauled, and they've (finally) got a really solid radio player, which is sucking in my approvals as it plays and refining my profile (as well as their itunes plugin that refines and builds my musical profile).

The feeling I get ploughing around this site is exactly the same I get when using delicious - it's the unexpected trails...which is perfect for the object-orientated nature of the tagging, recommendation and browsing.

I got sick of my personalised station (too many songs I already owned), so I started listening to a musical neighbour's personalised station feed instead. And it's throwing new tracks and artists at me...and I can buy albums I like straight from the app - something I wanted for a while.

This reminds me of the most profound talk at reboot this year (which I can't find a link to), where the guy talked about the success factor of social software - objects.

People collaborate, share, critique and generally react to objects. Delicious'sobjects are of course, bookmarks. Last FM's - songs, and Flickr's objects are of course, photos.

And these objects immediately engender interaction and activity that builds a halo of metadata, ostensibly with the act of tagging. But also of creating relationships, sets, genre membership and so on.

I've become a digital farmer, cultivating separate flocks of objects, stamping them with my personal whims, mental frameworks and knowledge. Hey, I wonder if that's why the 'social' browser was called Flock?

Now, of course, I seem to spend all my time trying to adapt successful consumer social software paradigms to corporate software use, and so I immediately see parallels - presentations that are shared, meeting notes that feature 'others', and of course, the killer corporate social 'object' - meetings.

But there is very little opportunity for object 'farming' in organisations. Very little control over your objects. And that's because the creation and discovery tools within organisations are totally, without exception, shit.

Imagine a last.fm type application in a big company that sucked in meetings, blog notes, presentations and allowed the same curating opportunities...you'd see virtual teams emerge, subscriptions to other employee's streams of consciousness.

And this object-orientated world is a step away if tools start sharing in a common format. Like RSS (and OPML). That's why I am so excited by Microsoft's RSS extensions - Simple Sharing Extensions.

RSS, as a mentality is going to transform organisations. It's that simple. What's the current adoption curve for organisations to benefit from consumer trends? A year, six months? Longer?

And e-learning? These lumbering, centralised systems are starting to creak and bulge from their overweight, bloated and useless form - take SCORM - it's an API/standard for building/deploying e-learning objects. But its focused on the technical interoperablity of units of content. There's no support for individual tagging, i.e. no opportunity for learners to take control of their own learning and contextualise their own learning objects.

A really useful learning management system would be one that adopted the social aspects of social software - sucking in and blowing out RSS, combining all sorts of content based on user interaction with it's objects , creating custom learning lists that empower learners to become digital farmers, not sheep.

That's why I'm so excited about next year. The year of RSS. The year of sharing objects.