[cc-community] 10k great Free songs (was Re: Rcrd Lbl to offer CC and Free as in Beer Music)

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Tue Nov 20 18:05:21 EST 2007


Hi Greg,

Greg London wrote:
>>Yes, search costs are incredibly high, but the task is fungible. :)

> You can crack wise all you want about "fungible".

I don't think people are making fun of your using the word "fungible",
so much as of the fact that it apparently can apply in multiple ways to
this discussion, so it was a bit broad as an argument. :-)

Or maybe they just think it's a funny word. :-)

Regarding your point, I think you are ignoring the Delphi effect, the
mainstream, and the genre segmentation of listeners.

The argument from the Mythical Man Month about adding more programmers
to a programming job is known to have significant exceptions in the area
of open source software, and I don't think it applies here at all. It
really has to do with systems that have extensive and inflexible
interdependencies.

In the area of collaborative reviews, we have several successful systems
for collecting review data from many people and generating rated lists
from it. This is how Amazon works, for example, and I am personally
*frightened* by how well that system seems to have figured out my tastes.

Listeners tend to group by genre, and radio stations suit themselves to
particular ones. Thus, it's possible to have works that are rated "as
Country & Western" or "as Electronica".

Of course, sometimes you will works that fall in the cracks between
genres and more adventuresome listeners will care about that. If there
are enough of them, though, they'll invent a new genre name and you can
start getting reviews of "Country Electronica" or whatever.

My point is that you are complaining about it being impossible to do
something we already routinely do with software, movies, books, and lots
of other products. So obviously, it CAN be done.

It may be true that we need better implementations (e.g. we don't have
Amazon's source code), but I don't think there's a fundamental obstacle
here.

Cheers,
Terry


-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



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