This post on boingboing
highlights the difficulty in identifying a song if you have no other
information about it. There are technologies such as MusicDNS and Shazam that are designed to assist in song identification, but these technologies don't always work. iden.tify.us
takes a Wisdom Of the Crowds approach. Trying to identify a song?
Upload a clip to iden.tify.us or type in a lyric, or just
describe the song and let others help identify it. iden.tify.us
is a brand new site (beta 0.1) with a small number of users, so the term
'wisdom of the crowds' may be relying on the "two's company three's a
crowd" definition of 'crowd'. iden.tify.us is trying some
novel ways to expand their user base. Frequent song identifiers can get
referral bonuses, and they make rss and podcast feeds available for the
content, allowing you to take song identification on the road (but would
you really want to?)
I don't see this becoming the next
digg, but it might be popular enough to actually attract the crowd that
will be necessary to make it useful. (and yes, I hate the
del.icio.us style names - I can never remember where to put the
dots. (via toby).
Thanks for link and the write up. I think you really understand what the site is all about and what we are trying to accomplish.
A note on the podcast, I guess I never really listen to my podcasts on the go, but I subscribe to many podcasts and listen to them on my computer, so I added that functionality so someone could subscribe to the feed in itunes and then go up to the site and identify a song for someone. I totally agree with you about the identification on the road, but you never know.
One more thing, you can drop the dots and still get the site, identifyus.com. (just added)
Thanks again for the thought and great blog btw, some really interested topic covered here. I'm now subscribed. Tom
Posted by Thomas Swift on May 21, 2007 at 04:10 AM EDT #