Strands is pleased to sponsor the Strands Summer 2008 haXe Project, an opportunity for students to receive funding for open source development focused on the web based programming language “haXe “. More details are available on the labs announcement page . This project is supported by Strands, as well as members of the haXe community.

The project is led by Justin Donaldson and Franco Ponticelli. Justin is a PhD candidate at Indiana University in the School of Informatics. He focuses on Music Recommendation and Human Computer Interaction, and has been a research intern at Strands for the past few years. Franco Ponticelli is the author of the book “Professional haXe and Neko” and an active member of the haXe community. He is a free-lance programmer with a passion for Web Applications and in his free time he is currently developing haXe/PHP, a method of targeting PHP using the haXe language.

Why haXe?

The World Wide Web has evolved into a complex assortment of platforms and languages. These languages often are considered as implementing different “layers” of an interactive web experience: From the client side layer languages of javascript and actionscript, to the server side layer languages of php. The variety of languages and protocols has made it difficult to create “cohesive” web applications that share information seamlessly across all of the layers. As a developer of rich internet applications, Strands is interested in streamlining the development of its growing number of products and services. HaXe presents a very promising approach towards unifying web development in an efficient and open manner.

HaXe has grown at a steady pace since 2005 when it was first released. Since then, 20 official releases have been made (latest is 1.19) each bringing new features, fixes, and new possibilities. The developer community has an active mailing list (http://lists.motion-twin.com/mailman/listinfo/haxe ) and also uses the #haxe IRC channel. HaXe has an integrated repository of community sponsored packages called “haxelib” (http://lib.haxe.org/ ), which contains dozens of useful projects and extensions (DBI’s, GUI toolkits, etc.).

Why participate?

By participating in the Strands Summer 2008 haXe Project, students will have the opportunity to discover a powerful development environment and to increase their experience working on projects that serve the greater community of open-source developers. With the continued support and interest of Strands and the haXe community, we are helping to make haXe an enterprise-ready, game-changing language for advanced interactive web development.

If you’re interested in learning more about haXe, you can find more information on its web page.

Or… if you’re a student and are interested in participating in our project, please check out the labs announcement page . Accepted student participants will be announced in the coming weeks.

Thanks,
Justin and Franco

Fresh from our Labs… iStrands enables you to build your profile at MyStrands.com in realtime while listening to your music on an iPhone or iPod touch.

Brought to you by Marc and Rich.

The old days when traditional gatekeepers programmed content for the mass-market are gone. Technology is shaking up the “chain of command” across popular culture. In the case of music, more and more consumers are looking at each other (friends, mavens, people they don’t even know…) to discover new songs and guide their tastes.

We have already talked about our approach for helping people discover things through other people’s tastes. Now we want to share further insight on how this process works.

Using OpenStrands (our public APIs), MyStrands’ researcher and PhD Candidate Justin Donaldson has developed a visualization technique (Artist Network Visualization) that shows in real-time how people correlate artists with other artists by listening to songs from their personal libraries. Strands of related artists will form from individual user’s listening histories. Eventually, these strands will connect, establishing the artist as a “hub” of shared musical information between the two users.

The visualization serves as a sort of primitive recommendation system as well. If you see an artist you recognize and enjoy, see who they’re connected to. You may just happen to see a new artist or track that you don’t recognize, and there’s a good chance that they’ll be worth a listen as well. MyStrands captures these opportunities in far more detail in our recommendation engine, enabling our community to explore artists, users, albums and many other items with equal ease. All these relationships form our “matrix of associations” which establishes a “ground truth” for how we at MyStrands understand the world of media content.

Try out Artist Network Visualization now!

We have linked our social music recommendations with Wikipedia facts. Check it out in our Labs. It is easy, fun and informative.

Sure, it’s fine to say, “if you like Green Day then you’ll like Blink-182″, but why stop there when we can bring that connection to life by tapping into Wikipedia’s vast storehouse of information! (In 2002, Blink-182 co-headlined the Pop Disaster Tour with Green Day, here).

Are you a fan of Jimi Hendrix? Did you know, for example, that “After a number of European club appearances, word of Hendrix spread through the London music community. His showmanship and virtuosity made instant fans of reigning guitar heroes Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, as well as members of The Beatles and The Who, whose managers signed Hendrix to The Who’s record label, Track Records” (here).

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And by the way, if you’re a developer interested in doing cool stuff like this, you should know that this feature is implemented using OpenStrands, the MyStrands Public API. OpenStrands is a set of web services for developers interested in adding MyStrands functionality to their applications.

Are you more than a music lover?

Do you like to go beyond the boundaries of your iPod and see your favorite artists perform live on stage? Then we’ve got some recommendations for you. We’ll tell you not only where your favourite artists are appearing soon, but also where and when you can see other artists we think you’ll enjoy. Plan your next five concerts right here, right now!

Wondering what to get your music-loving friend who already has every song he’s ever wanted? Get him to put down the headphones and pick up a book! There is a new feature on the labs to suggest books based on an artist. This is achieved by combining our artist recommender and Google Base. We would like to offer to our community members the option to discover content other than music. And if you can’t get your friend to ditch the headphones for an hour, at least he can read while he listens. More cross-content recommenders will follow, so stay tuned!

The MyStrands recommender system is built on a highly complex network of music relationships. We do our best to sweep a lot of this complexity “under the rug”, so that you can get the best recommendation with a minimum of fuss. However, we think this music network stuff is really interesting, and have been hard at work coming up with new ways of analyzing, visualizing, and leveraging the information in our system. To that end, we’d like to announce Recommendation Mapping. Using this system, you can submit one of your playlists, and “visualize” the playlist and recommendations that are returned from our system. The closer the songs are on the map, the more similar these songs are according to our community listening behavior. You can browse through the map, check out the songs, and listen to some song previews. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear feedback!

Go to MyStrands labs and try it out!