I’m pretty dedicated to Last.fm so I was curious to see what apple had whipped up. Turns out, not much. Let me show you how Apple convinced me to ditch my profile moments after I created it (click for full size):

Let’s break it down.

Artists We Recommend You Follow

iTunes has access to all my listening and purchase history and this is the best they can come up with? I would be surprised If I ever played a single song from one of those artists (or the next 2 pages). Why would I ever want to follow them? I doubt they could recommend much worse for my tastes.

People We Recommend You Follow

Who the hell are these people? Oh, I see. A record producer, a DJ and…another DJ. Why are they recommended? Do I have anything in common with these people?

Recent Activity

Pretty standard social feature these days. I can see when people I follow do stuff like…purchase music, review music they purchased, like songs etc. The activity seems to be based mainly around interacting with the iTunes store. You can attach comments to items and buy songs that people you follow are interacting with.

Colour me unimpressed. I don’t know what I would do on Ping other than try to find people.

Now, let’s take a look at Last.fm when I sign in (click for full size):

Whoa check out all that awesome stuff!

New to your library

New artists that I listened to for the first time. A nice reminder, maybe I’ll listen again soon.

Last.fm Recommendations

Two new albums being released from Artists I’ve listened to. Nice one, if I follow that link there will be even more. Below I get some artists who I’ll probably like because they make Chiptune music and I’ve been listening to a lot of that lately. This beats the pants of Ping already.

Your Friends

Oh hey look, I can see what my friends are listening to recently. That’s way better than having to sift through activity to find out what they recently bought.

Further down we have events but Ping should have this soon so I won’t talk about that. Needless to say, they are relevant to my location and tastes.

And so…

That’s about it. Maybe it’s unfair to pit a brand new services against a well established one and sure Ping and Last.fm have slightly different goals but throw us a bone here Apple. Ping is just another “me to” social network that feels lazy and uninspired. The one feature they did polish was the ability to disable your account with one click. Kudos.

Morning rush hour in the 4th largest city in the Netherlands. Streets look like this when 33% of ALL trips are made by bicycle!

This is an ordinary Wednesday morning in April 2010 at around 8.30 am. Original time was 8 minutes that were compressed into 2 minutes, so everything is 4 times faster than in reality. The sound is original.

This is one of the busiest junctions in Utrecht a city with a population of 300,000. No less than 18,000 bicycles and 2,500 buses pass here every day. And yet Google Street View missed it. Because private motorized traffic is restricted here.

These cyclists cross a one way bus lane (also used by taxis and municipal vehicles), two light rail tracks and then a one way street that can be used by private vehicles.

Behind the camera is a railway (you can hear the squeaking sounds of the trains passing) and the main railway station is very close too. A number of rental bikes from the station pass and many of the cyclists will have come by train for the first part of their commute.

For those who frown upon the total absence of bike helmets in this video, consider these findings from a US study:

“Cycling in the Netherlands is much safer than in the USA. The Netherlands has the lowest non-fatal injury rate as well as the lowest fatality rate, while the USA has the highest non-fatal injury rate as well as the highest fatality rate. Indeed, the non-fatal injury rate for the USA is about 30 times higher than for the Netherlands.

Injury rate per million km cycled: USA 37.5; NL 1.4

Fatality rate per 100 million km cycled: USA 5.8; NL 1.1″

From: Pucher, John and Buehler, Ralph (2008) ‘Making Cycling Irresistible: Lessons from The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany’.

http://policy.rutgers.edu/faculty/pucher/Irresistible.pd

- Markenlei on Youtube

Designed with both the typophile and card player in mind, Helveticards are the beautiful, usable alternative to the traditional deck of cards that both Vignelli and Brunson would be happy to deal. (I’d like to think so, at least.)

I bought two packs of these playing cards a while back and I’m really enjoying them. Here’s a couple photos Chelsee took:

Grab some yourself here

Popular sites tend to get a lot of push back and arm waving from users when they roll out changes. including a handy little guide like this helps users understand why the changes were made and how they make the site better.

If you’re interested in more details on the Flickr update check out their official post

I decided it would be fun to make a mobile site so I took the opportunity to experiment with jQTouch. jQtouch is a jQuery framework for creating AJAX sites that mimic native iPhone applications. It took only a few hours to whip up a nice little site using the framework and it was a lot of fun. After poking around and setting up all my html I jumped right into modifying one of the default themes to give it a more custom look. The wood headings were inspired by the beautiful wooden portfolio Chelsee totes around.

My main goal with the site was to supply a home screen that acted much like a business card. I wanted to display some basic info and make it easy to contact Chelsee. The iPhone being a phone makes it possible to email or place a phone call without leaving the page. Neato.

The secondary goal was to take the content from the regular site and make it easy to browse on a phone. Photos are divided up into categories and can be scrolled through like any page. I experimented with some more complicated slideshow type setups but they proved to be slower and less intuitive. The CV and links section translated easily.

All in all I am happy with the site. The iPhone experience is significantly better and makes it easy to quickly contact Chelsee and understand what sort of work she produces. Sometime in the future I plan to optimize the site a bit more and do some testing with Android devices and other mobile webkit browsers.

Here’s a mini video if you’re curious about how the site works and don’t have a fancy phone.

Now you can browse through festivals and Last.fm will display you your compatibility with the festivals lineup. Each festival page also has a radio station made up from the Artists playing the festival. Last.fm even suggests which bands you should go see at the festival based on your listening data. Very useful stuff.

I was tinkering with the Last.fm  API attempting to generate a playlist of top songs from artists preforming at Sasquatch this year. The new festival radio stations will work much better.

Read Last.fm’s  post on festivals

It wasn’t that bad outside when Jason and I decided to go disc golfing after work yesterday. It had hailed for a little while and weather stations were reportinghigh wind warnings but that’s nothing new. But as we drove to the course it started to get worse, so much worse.

Jason driving directly into a ridiculous headwind

Giant wet snowflakes fell from the sky and the constant wind made my face feel like it was being slapped around. Beers were cracked and we immediately regretted it as our fingers froze even faster. On many holes it was difficult to see the baskets and my putts kept getting picked up by the wind and thrown farther away than I had started from.

Needless to say, this was a challenging (and wet) 9 holes but it was fun.

I don’t click on a lot of ads but I like Iceland and the text/image combo without any other branding made me laugh a little. I was curious to know what it was an ad for. Upon clicking on the link you are brought to a wonderfully minimal and witty website, icelandwantstobeyourfriend.com.

To me this campaign is a perfect example of “social media marketing” done right. It’s clever, leverages existing services properly and most importantly it isn’t in your face or spammy.

I started following Iceland on twitter to see what kinds of things they posted and I noticed today that they’ve kicked the campaign up another notch (in my eyes at least). This tweet links to a page where you can download a musical piece by Olafur Arnalds. Olafur is from iceland and creates beautiful music (Eulogy for Evolution is a really great album/piece). The download page looks nice and fun and I hope they continue to release individually designed micro sites/pages.

I’ll be keeping my eyes on what this digital Iceland identity is up to. Chelsee and I have always talked about visiting Iceland to experience the beauty and great music scene. If this campaign says anything about the tourist board then they must be rather welcoming to foreigners.

The more you know!