Eric Wahlforss is one of the guys behind SoundCloud. This is where he jots down thoughts on the web, music and strategy, among other things.
More About Eric »
Trustmojo.com goes online!
I’m currently in San Francisco trying to figure out how trust works on the web. Me and my partner in crime, Alexander Ljung, has started a blog/project site that we call trustmojo.
Check it out for live reports, ramblings, interviews, photos, podcasts and other juicy bits on trust from San Francisco and the Bay Area. We’ll be here until beginning of September and then the project continues back in Stockholm.
As you might have noticed, I post very rarely here, and I probably won’t post that much in the future either. I’ll blog a lot more on trustmojo.com and forss.to the next coming months though…
Bloggforum 3
Will be in a panel on copyright and blogs at Bloggforum 3, 19th of November in Stockholm. I’ve really enjoyed reading the other participants blogs; Markus Fleischer, Simon Winter, and Oscar Swartz. They’re all better bloggers than I am, they also know more about copyright. Hopefully by saturday, I’ll be able to connect these issues with music and economics in some clever way, hmm…I will ask my smart friends for help.
Structured Blogging and Collaborative Filtering
In 2003 Alf Eaton proposed a standard RDF-vocabulary for reviews. That started off an interesting discourse that has now lead up to the Structured Blogging Initiative (among other things). Structured blogging is basically about..well..structuring blog content (ratings, reviews, events, etc) so that it becomes machine-readable.
It struck me that one of the cool things that one could potentially do — if a lot of people start to use this technology — is to build a distributed collaborative filtering system on top of it. I imagine a service that would track your blog, get out your ratings/opinions, build a profile for you (much like last.fm does), and match that with the profiles of other bloggers. The system could then provide you with a number of feeds that could give you relevant and accurate recommendations on things such as books, movies and music. It could also point you to other bloggers with similar taste.
This technology — again if it gets widely adopted — will, I believe, have interesting effects on the blogosphere. What happens when there is a massive peer-to-peer colloborative filtering infrastructure around? One thing is certain — The tail will get ridiculously long…
UPDATE: This 2002 paper by Hassan Masum outlines TOOL, The Open Opinion Layer. Great read.
Tags Enabled
Just enabled tags on the blog. You can see it in action on the sidebar “previous posts”-feed. Makes it consistent with my del.icio.us-feed, and it makes Technorati happy (Actually my post is the only one showing up under collaborativefiltering).
And I bought a copy of ecto, which is by far the best blogging client for the Mac. I also hear the next version has even better tagging integration…
456 Berea Street redesigns
Roger Johansson, the guy who runs 456 Berea Street, (an excellent web design blog — probably the best out of Sweden) redesigned and linked to me today! I’m happy to get such a warm welcome in the blogosphere — this will definitely keep me going for a while…
Back to Blogging
Phew, finally got my act together and put a new blog up. Had a redesign resting on my Powerbook for year or so, but I was too much of a perfectionist to let it go online — and I never had the time to fix the bugs. So anyway, following the Three Commandments, I decided to release it anyway, bugs included.
If I know myself well enough, this site will probably stay in “perpetual beta”. At least I’m in good company.
Slowly realising facts
On the bus. I slept all the way from Berlin to
Stockholm, only waking up once to take a photo.
I am addicted to screens.
And every time I work for a long time with my computer I “forget” part of my social ability. My eyes loose tracking, I forget to smile, to do the necessary small talk. I feel dull, stupid and …repelling.
It always takes a couple of hours to “come back”.
In front of my screen I feel comfortable again. I give my computer a command — it gives me feedback. And so it goes.
An electrically amplified infinity loop, fuelling ego and will.
Every now and then I get ideas about design, music, philosophy, technology…and other things. Sometimes I write them down.
On the Forssfeed I intend to publish some of those writings, so that people like you can get a chance to read and comment on them.
The Forssfeed will hopefully be a low quantity-high quality thing.
So, no need to peek in too often — a better idea might be to subscribe to my feed using your favourite news reader.
Ok, so who am I and what am I doing? Have a look at the Forssfolio!