I love what people do with collected crowdsourced music data - another good reason to track your listening habits with last.fm.

The Echonest & Play.me deliver the music:

Over the years, we’ve seen many different ways for people to discovery new music come and go. When I was growing up, the radio DJ was the primary way people people discovered new music. The DJ was the tastemaker for the generation. For the next generation, I think music apps will be one of the primary ways people discover new music.

All good except for those dreaded words: “US Only”. Like Spotify and other promising music discovery apps. We need a global music provider to step up.

Massively looks back at Ultima Online:

UO got one thing right: it felt like a persistent world where one could simply exist. No other MMO has ever been able to get that feel right, though Star Wars Galaxies came close. These days, I don’t feel like I’m an active participant in my MMO’s world; in Ultima Online, I felt that I had a real place in it.

That seems to be a common thread talking to ex UOers - you could just ‘be', without participating in endgame or designer mandated gameplay.

Kotaku on Brink character customisation:

Everything from race to body type to clothing, from the videos I’ve seen and the interviews I’ve read, it seems as though there are an absurd number of options for players… except being a female.

I always choose a female avatar first in games, though it’s a bit of a struggle with Dwarves.

Very nice: on-the-go cycling directions (though US only for now):

Since launching biking directions on desktop Google Maps, we’ve wanted to get you biking directions, lanes, and trails on your phone too. Just in time for National Bike Month, select the bike icon when getting directions to get an optimal bicycling route in the U.S. If you’re in the mood for a more scenic ride, you’ll also see the Bicycling layer on the map which shows dedicated bike-only trails (dark green), roads with bike lanes (light green), or roads that are good for biking but lack a dedicated lane (dashed green).

Interesting concept from Wired - crowdsourcing a book that everyone reads and discusses in a gigantic twitter book club.

The winner was American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and the reading schedule and discussion began last week. 

By following @1b1t2010 on twitter, and appending #1b1t to your tweets, you can participate in a chaotic global discussion, with Mr Gaiman himself chiming in to answer questions. I get the feeling it needs some kind of moderation to cut through the noise, but maybe the concept will evolve for the next book.

Great live-in-the-studio version from triple j’s Like a Version series. Download a copy from triple j.

And yet the 2% will no doubt stop it.

Seed Magazine posits an answer to Fermi’s Paradox (“if extraterrestrial intelligence is common, why haven’t we met any bright aliens yet?”):

“Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot.”

Our brains can’t cope with tracking the real-life signs of biological fitness, instead:

“The result is that we don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography.” 

And when we do find the smart Aliens?

“When they finally achieve contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox.”

Genius.

The Boston Globe’s always great Big Picture gets an iPhone app.

The iPhone is a strangely excellent platform for viewing photos. Despite the small screen, the images look very sharp - the football photos on The Guardian’s brilliant app being a great example. I suspect it’s a combination of the fact that it’s full (albeit mini) screen (so no distractions) and the touch scrolling.