Thursday, February 09, 2006

Time Enough

Today's post is dedicated to that last great resource, time. We've all got the same amount of it, and you're tossing yours away right now reading this post. In the Attention Economy, the last great resource to grab is people's time. Note all the free apps out there which are driven by ad revenue (Google anyone?). In the attention economy you're paying for services by surrending part of your time to ads. Some sites let you "buy back" your time by paying extra fees to get rid of the ads, like two of my favorites, IGN and BoardGameGeek. I've given both of these sites money to kill the ads and "buy back" my time. I've signed up with 30 Boxes (beta, naturally) - an online shareable calendar. This is supposed to help you better coordinate your time with yourself and others. It's a pretty nifty app, but I've probably spent more time playing with it than it's saved. To punctuate my post, I've created a playlist, so I can multitask and listen to songs which somehow relate to time while writing this post. I've gone for a more modern list, starting with Time Machine by The Click Five as my seed song - the heavy lifting was done by MusicMagic Mixer, naturally. You can find the playlist on FIQL (beta, naturally). Here's a link: http://www.fiql.com/view.php?id=4064 - I wanted to include the nifty Javascript badges, but it looks like Blogger doesn't let me include scripts. Curses! (Time to look for a new blog host already?) Ok, time to take Time Out For Fun (no affiliate id, and iTunes can't even get the metadata right. Not a beta - go figure!)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi there, it's Mike from FIQL.com. We just posted a workaround to the blogger javascript problem on the site. When you submit your post, initially, you will get an error message. Simply check "Stop showing errors for this post" and resubmit your post. It should work. Hope this helps!

Unknown said...

Excellent, I'll try that out. Do you know if FIQL is planning on adding support for XSPF lists? That would make importing them a lot easier (at least for XSPF files which include the metadata fields).

Anonymous said...

We've been watching XSPF for a while but people haven't been exactly clamoring for it (at least not to us). Aside from Yahoo who else uses it as their native playlist format? Does MusicMagic?

Unknown said...

MusicMagic can use either m3u or xspf. The advantage of xspf for FIQL would be that the metadata is all trivially parseable, so the playlists would come right in. For my "Time" playlist, I had to type in over half of the metadata by hand, which is a bit of a pain.

But you're right that it hasn't gained widespread acceptance yet.