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Over the past month we’ve tried to give links at the end of each post that could help you learn, hear, and read more about the artists talked about in the featured article. As I was getting a post ready to publish today I read into what exactly I was doing. It’s more than loosely related links that might be of interest to a reader that we’re providing, it’s more along the lines of providing the semantic web for our readers. Yes, we’re going deep into “web” talk – more than some of you would like but stick with me because if you are reading this you are probably a fan of music on some level and this will certainly pertain to you. The semantic web could be expressed as a layer of the internet that knows the strong relationships between what I am searching for and the relevant results on the Internet. Alex Iskold, CEO of AdaptiveBlue (more on them later), explains it like this: “The purpose of the semantic web is to enable computers to “understand” semantics the way humans do.” In the case of AjiSignal we highlight an artist almost everyday. At the end of the article are links where you can find more info – how to buy, see shows, listen to more music, find similar artists, watch video, and find pictures; the last two examples referencing FoxyTunes. That brings up the point that I want to address. FoxyTunes being the very cool aggregator of musical artists’ content where I can search for an artist and the results being “this artist on…last.fm, flickr, hypemachine etc”. The other company that I really, really like a lot and have been following for a long time now is AdaptiveBlue and their technology called SmartLinks. SmartLinks are even cooler than FoxyTunes because the extended discovery occurs in a pop up inside the initial browser page. In the context of an artists’ album, a SmartLink pop up would give me Last.fm info, YouTube results, Wikipedia results, and places to buy this music. Presently I can only create a SmartLink based off a tangible item like an artists’ album on Amazon. With FoxyTunes I can enter an artists’ name and get a lot of the same information. The drawback is that all the FoxyTunes results must reside in a different browser window. So, I can’t read about an artist on AjiSignal, click a FoxyTunes link in the article, and see a pop up of FoxyTunes results for that artist. Now that would be cool! And what would be better is if you as a reader you could enter in info about that artist that you felt should be included in those results. That is another level of Wiki type complexity but still very relevant to this topic. Without the services of these two companies you as a reader would have to know where to find more information on the web if you wanted to learn more about that artist. You would start with a Google search and see where that leads. Then you might use YouTube and see where that goes. SmartLinks take those steps away and does the searching and filtering for you and what you get is a nice package of pure results.
FoxyTunes and SmartLinks provide the most helpful information that can further a reader’s knowledge of an artist. Unfortunately we’re only able to offer FoxyTunes results because SmartLinks don’t seem to work well with the styling of our page. We’d like to get that happening ASAP.
All of this stuff is important because without it the experience of a new artist that we highlight on AjiSignal will end here for most. One of our goals is to further the discovery of an artist; SmartLinks and FoxyTunes enable that.

-Patrick

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AjiSignal is a magazine
about new music in cities.