does absence make the heart grow fonder?

Well I promise ... I won't answer the above question in this post.

For being absent for this stretch of time, I am disappointingly coming back with a fluff post. Before I get into the meat of the post, I thought I would take a moment to congratulate Shawn Graham and his NB Liberals on their election victory. The election proved disastrous for the NB NDB … here’s hoping Allison Brewer gets the boot.

Back to you’re regularly scheduled programme ....

For the past few months I have been a member of last.fm … a “social music” site. Basically you join up and install an app that tracks the music you listen to; which gets posted to your profile for all to see, and you build a social fabric based on that. I joined up with last.fm with out much though; it didn’t set off any alarm bells at the time, and it seemed like a pretty interesting idea.

Here’s the big BUT.

Letting everyone and their dog (not literally the dog I suppose) know so much information about a person’s music listening habits could be potentially dangerous. Sure it’s nice to make a few cyber friends that share similar musical tastes, but having an archive of ones musical interest seems to be potentially dangerous … on many levels. Having this data is stored away on somebody’s server has a creepy “Orwellian” feel to it. Will this data ever make it to an enterprise that could exploit it … or maybe it has?

With all the social networking sites out there on the Internet, I imagine it wouldn’t take much to know an individual quite a bit more than most would be comfortable with. That’s not to say I’m quitting last.fm, but the above mentioned issue does give me pause, and I thought I would pass it along.

Have a joyous Rosh Hashanah,

Julian-Courtney

Below is my last.fm most played artists ...

Tweet