Change in Funding Model for Lastfm

This post has nothing to do with education. It does consider changes in social networking and the profit potential in new ideas.

I have been a fan of lastfm for more than a year. Lastfm is free (with ads I suppose), but I pay $4 a month. I don’t use most of the features because I am older and not that interested in the social networking opportunities. The technology on the back end interests me a great deal – I like the way the service accumulates data about my habits and attempts to identify what these habits might mean about my taste in music. BTW – the little widget that appears at the end of this blog page is a feed from lastfm.Lastfm was recently sold to CBS and there have been some interesting changes. The most noticeable is the opportunity to play entire tracks (rather than the standard 30 second track offered as a preview by services such as iTunes). There is a limit on how many times you can do this for a given song (3 I think). The idea is to give you a better opportunity to make decisions about purchases.

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Growing Up Online – Dateline Program

Frontline (PBS) had an hour program entitled “Growing Up Online” that aired this evening. The program explores a wide variety of topics (cheating, social networking dangers, generational differences). You can view the program and related material at the PBS site. These resources would be quite useful in a pre-service teacher ed tech class.

I learned of this program from other blogs and it appeared some felt the program would play up negative issues and this would result in an overly negative public reaction to services that have value. While the focus was probably more on “concerns” than opportunities, in areas in which I have read some of the research (e.g., danger from online predators), I thought the program raised the issues I felt were necessary to present an accurate picture (e.g., level of solicitation from strangers is rare, adolescents are aware of dangers, risky behavior has multiple causes). I did not feel the program focused on fear mongering.

(NYTimes follow-up, Washington Post follow-up)

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