Clever mog
Posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 9:32pm. #
This isn’t a posting about my moggy - though that’s him, just up there, relaxing in Yorkshire in 1999. (Eight years later, he is warming my lap as I type this).
No, this is a posting about Mog.com, a new music website (well, new to me, anyway) which has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve.
So far, Pandora makes you type some of your favourite songs to base a jukebox around them; last.fm insists that you install some software to spy on what you play, and waits until you’ve played 200 songs to give you some useful personalised information. Mog.com is interesting, because it has a piece of software called ‘Mog-o-matic’ which appears to go through your music files and lets the website know what you own. It’s a fairly quick process (taking overnight from my point of view), and from that… hey presto, music recommendations. To a point.
Being frank, the music recommendations aren’t up to much using mog.com. This is probably because the system just knows what’s in my collection, and not what I listen to most. So, recommended songs include a Stereophonics song I loathe, albeit lots of other songs I don’t, yet, recognise.
But the interesting thing is Mog TV (in beta, naturally). This kind of works by scouring YouTube for stuff it reckons you like. Punch it up on thne MacMini connected to the television, as I did over the weekend, and it plays music television - exclusively, stuff I might like.
There’s a lot of Beatles in my iTunes collection, for example (and a lot of Monty Python, and there’s a reason for that which I won’t bore you with) - so I get a lot of Beatles tracks on Mog TV. Except YouTube throws up a fascinating set of treatment of Beatles songs - from the manic ukelele player I mention earlier to some great, presumably home-made, video clips. In short, not only did I get ‘official’ clips, but also a set of fascinating, unofficial, creative clips too.
I’m enjoying Current, the new TV channel on Sky, but when I want music, Mog TV is really rather fine. And the clever bit is: it’s all coming from YouTube in the first place. Mog doesn’t have to worry about music payments, copyright, or anything else.
Viacom’s concerns about YouTube aside: is this what MTV should have done? Why watch non-stop music videos I don’t like, when I can watch non-stop music videos that I do enjoy on Mog TV?
Incidentally, the best way I’ve found so far of finding new music is this post from Dan Taylor, from which I used a non-UK-based online music retailer (coughski) to purchase all the albums I’d not already got, to give them a decent test. I like Belle and Sebastian, and will be purchasing more of their albums from a UK-based retailer soon. (I did not like Yo La Tengo, however.)
