OK, OK,  this is going to be something of an I-was-wrong. (There must be an elegant word for that, but it escapes me, unsurprisingly.) About Spotify, that is. If not here, then at least in person I've been less than enthusiastic about it, and given that I'm something of a contrarian, the great press it's picked up almost from inception has hardly endeared it to me. And if I've had one beef about all that coverage - and I'm talking coverage in the most mainstream of places here - it's probably summed up in the question "Er, haven't you heard of Last.fm? Where have you been?" OK, that's two questions, but you catch my drift.

Now I'm  going to get round to that wrong-ness admission (still can't think of the word for it ) shortly, but first let me reiterate my Spotify gripes.

From the get-go I've found its slickness a little offputting. Like I say, I'm a contrarian. Of course, in truth, the first time I used it I was impressed with its UX, the ease of use, the robustness of the streaming, and even if I naturally favour the web-based, Spotify's manifestation as a desktop app made a lot of sense. 

Oh, and it had a lot of pretty decent catalogue in there. Plainly not as extensive as Last's, but then again, unlike the latter, with Spotify you could request specific tracks. The cloud jukebox of theory rendered, well, real.

Oh, hold up, this is the gripes bit. Thing is, yes, it was plainly good at the start, but there was just something... The ads, of course, were annoying, but that's the Freemium model for you. I could always, well, pay. But they - the ads, that is -  spoke of something else, of a business model a little too easy to see, a little too surface. But as I say, I understood why the ads were there, and could live with them.

Then the emails started. Emails so un-targetted as to be an intrusion. Let's call 'em what they are: SPAM. Oh I know, not technically. No doubt  I'd ticked - or not ticked - the right - or wrong - boxes, somewhere. But for all that, if I get an email telling me about  Paul Rodgers with Queen  or Blur or La Roux or... well you get the picture... if I get an email like that I'm thinking SPAM, right? And then there's the offers: join now and get two free downloads. Wow, sign up for a tenner-a-month service and get a couple of MP3s on the house. The largesse is overwhelming.

And then... there was the customer survey. Call me a freak but I tend to do surveys. OK, not the telephone insurance survey which woke me up on Sunday morning, but most online consumer surveys I do tend to fill in. It's partly a confessional need, but mostly - I hope - it's driven by inquisitiveness. You can tell a lot about what a company thinks by the questions it asks... about what you think. And I certainly wanted to know what Spotify wanted to know about what I thought.

So I did it. With Justin. I thought we'd find it revealing, but I don't think either of us had any idea how revealing. I'll do no more here than bullet our observations, but I think they stand...

a. It was too long, way too long! It took us 25 - twenty-five -  minutes to complete. Who has that kind of time spare? Apart from us. And it was work for us, right? Seriously - that is utter lunacy. The worst of it was that the survey had a progress bar; after the first couple of "rounds" we were getting seriously traumatised. (It's what a friend of mine refers to as the "Drowning by Numbers moment", although I do feel honour-bound to say he'd felt it during one of mine and J's presentations. Everyone's a critic, apparently.)

b. OK, this is the school teacher bit (and probably a dangerous thing to mention, in type) but it was full of real stinker typos. I don't have an essential problem with this - we're all guilty - but in a document which had, presumably, passed under many eyes, it struck us both as, well, lazy. (As opposed to "well lazy". Eats, shoots, leaves, up with which I will not put, etc.)

c. The questions were, at times, logical nonsense. You know the kind of questions, the ones where the answer you want to give - should give if you're being in any way honest or accurate - just aren't an option. Where the options haven't really been thought about. Where the answers, in all truth, display...

d. Utter transparency. This was surely the worst of it. Seriously, doing the survey I felt like I could see the case being built for a combination of advertisers and record labels in front of my very eyes. Which is like being used, if you think about it. 

e. I said that was the worst of it; I didn't say the last. But I'll make this it. The reward for filling the damn thing in was pretty pitiful: to go into a draw for a bunch of CDs drawn at random from the Top 40.

And there it is again: the Top 40. The email ads for Queen and Blur. It just feels too, too... industry.

And yet, and yet... I'm starting to feel very foolish for all that. 

First up, I start to get not a few friends talk - no rave - about it. Not credulous friends, either, nor techtopians. Skeptics, you might think. But raving Spotify for all that.

Then Joe, my oldest son gets back from University and, well, it's all about Spotify. Joe's a 70s soul fanatic. It happens. And he's building one bastard soul music playlist on Spotify. iTunes? Forget it. The next thing I know, the cooking time kitchen iPod-off between me, him and younger brother Franck has become a Spotify-off, and Faith No More is up against The Temptations, and Foreign Beggars are facing off The Drifters. You get the picture. 

So I'm there already, to be honest, then only this morning, I get the final confirmation. I'm probably the last to realise that you can Scrobble from Spotify, and officially. It hadn't even occurred that you'd be able to do it with anything other than a hack (and there was one: Scobblify). After all, when J and I filled in that survey a few months back, Last hadn't even been mentioned as a competitor. Just goes to show that coders think differently to marketeers. Thank Christ.

Here's what the Spotifly blog had to say on the matter:

Almost immediately after launch we started getting heaps of requests from people who wanted to be able to scrobble the music they were playing on Spotify to Last.fm (Last.fm is a cool music recommendation site for those of you who don’t know). The demand was so high that people started creating their own solutions to scrobble, which were cool but a little hard to install and run for the average user.
So today we are really excited to announce that we’ve added scobbling support directly into Spotify, no more need to install any other software. To setup scrobbling just open the user preferences in Spotify and enter your Last.fm username and password and you’re ready to scrobble.

(I'm ashamed to say that post's from December by the way.)

Now this is how it should work: it's an ecosystem after all!
(It's also how it should work in terms of companies listening to their customers, too, but that;s a different matter.) This morning I was recommended a new release by my favourite neo-surf band, The Mermen... by Amazon. I checked it on Spotify - and there it was! Listened to it all the way through, it scrobbling all the way of course (turns out it just needs a prefs tweak). Then Last starts recommending other neo-surf acts. By the end of the morning, I've not only gone and ordered the the new Mermen CD, but one by the fabulously-monickered Man or Asro-Man as well. Cool.

None of which is to say that there's not a long way to go: Spotify's inventory needs a major boost to satisfy our more perverse tastes. But like I say, this IS how it should work. iTunes, I have to say, is looking very sorry indeed.

How's that for an apology, then?
Simon

Justin, John and myself have been looking at some of the work universities and colleges are doing in the digital arena - especially using the iTunes/U platform; this Don "Wikinomics" Tapscott piece makes the point that colleges which don't adapt to the new technologies are going to go the same way as the newspaper industry.

"One thing is for sure.  The smartest students want to get an “A” without having ever gone to the lectures.  They understand that there are better ways of learning than being the passive recipient of a one-way, one size fits all, teacher-focused model where the student is isolated in the learning process.  When the cream of the crop of an entire generation is boycotting the formal model of pedagogy, the writing is in the wall."

We're intrigued by the premise of New York's ARChive project, and tantalised by its online potential. In their own words:"The ARChive was established because for decades the record industry has done little to preserve its own heritage, and over the years many irreplaceable recordings and artifacts have been misplaced or destroyed. Even as the new medium of CDs has placed many out of print recordings back in circulation, many re-issues have different or truncated material, and many CDs themselves are already out of print. The record industry has yet to act to preserve its own heritage, as the film industry recently did after realising that nearly half of all films produced before 1950 have been lost."

Reminds us of the deeply fabulous Ubuweb archive of avant garde and experimental film.

Simon

Two things that helped our thinking this week.

One - this very interesting little tool called Vote Match, which takes the user through a range of statements on European policy, asking you to agree or disagree, so that you can find out how which party best suits your own views. The first thing I found, which acted as a useful reminder as a person very keen to end political party style representation, is just how little knowledge or frankly opinion I had on a number of the policy issues raised. After a bit of use it really got me thinking about just how some kind of web based voting mechanism that focused on issues  rather than parties might work. It would be tricky - no doubt about it, but it gave me faith that there may well be a way to unbind ourselves from having to represented by MPs or MEPs at all.

The other site that really got me thinking is the MacArthur digital learning site which has recently announced which projects it has awarded funds to this year. The award supports 'projects that demonstrate new modes of participatory learning, in which people take part in virtual communities, share ideas, comment on one another’s projects, and advance goals together.' - which sounds like a good measure of the kind of project we'd be interested in; and they are. There are 14 projects awarded this year and all of them look really exciting and have something different to tell us about the ways in digital tools and connectedness are completely changing the way we learn and teach. Lots of clever partnerships, useful data mash-ups, global collaboration and the use of mobiles to connect teachers and learners in different countries to improve literacy - a bit overwhelming but thoroughly inspiring stuff.
Justin

Well what can we say about our absence, nothing except we are going to get back on it and start being lot more present and trying to do a bit more thinking in public.

So just to start with a couple of things.

One, we love Weebly. This site is made on Weebly, but to be honest we love any website that enables you to build another website. Square Space does just that, and my goodness it looks beautiful and is ridiculously flexible, so much so that when when first saw it in action we thought we'd have to go and rebuild our site in it straight away. Instead of that rather rash move, we are doing some messing about with it to see how it might well work some of the people we are working for. So far I'd say it's a winner, so big thanks to Charles for that tip-off, he has a rather lovely squarespace website and an immensely readable and philiosphical blog that looks at what businesses need to do to survive.

On a very different tangent I just want to bring your attention to an event that happened a little while back but that is of much interest to us. It was called Hacking Education and was set up by Union Square Ventures, namely Fred Wilson, Albert Wenger and Brad Burnham. Brad has recently done a thorough round up post of the day and published the transcript of the whole event. The day looks fascinating and touched many area that Simon and myself are particularly excited about.

There are discussions about how technology is changing the nature of collaboration, about how the experience of formal learning is becoming unbundled in front of our eyes and the implications of that process on society. And, another one of our hobbyhorses, the relationship between gaming and learning, with some fairly mindblowing ideas from Katie Salen, including a new school based opening this year based on game dynamics.

Justin