On my last.nerve

1, 2, 3, I officially hate Last.fm. It's probably the most inaccurate, inelegant folksonomy website ever. I bitched about it before, but I'm bitching about it again.

First of all, whenever I play my Finnish boyfriend's station, it always plays the same 10 songs each time, and they're not even things he listens to. And then today I tried to play the 'Shibuya-kei' tag station to hear some neat stuff, but not a single track it played out of about 15 was from the genre, so I figure "Fine, maybe people just don't know what that means because I really don't either" so I went to the 'Japanese' tag station because it's easier to know when things are Japanese.

So after 25 tracks of Alice Coletrane, Lou Reed, the Godfather soundtrack, Swedish electronica, and Irish folk music (all of which I skipped except for this one France Gall song) I got really annoyed, and then 2Pac came on, I closed the site in one of my little huffs.

I was looking at their joblist the other day to see if anything sounded interesting and within my skill set. Then I noticed they're British, and I'm not moving there. But honestly, what is this staff doing all day?

My recommendations are all things I hate and it WON'T LET UP with that horrid Michelle Branch MORE LIKE MICHELLE BRANSHEE!

Anyway, I don't know what's wrong with it, it wasn't like this a few weeks ago when I found it. Last.fm gets tons of attention in Web 2.0 blogs and discussions, but it exemplifies all the horrible qualities the folksonomy naysayers complain about. What really needs to happen here is the tagging structure and recommendation scheme need to be brought to the fore. On a site like LibraryThing, all the tags are right there, and it's always perfectly clear why something is suggested for you even if the suggestion sucks. Things are always "similarly tagged" and/or "most popular". With Last.fm, it's never clear.

When playing a tag station like 'shibuya-kei,' what you're hearing is clearly not songs or artists tagged as such. My theory is that you're hearing songs and artists that people who use the tag 'shibuya-kei' also listen to, but since nobody listens to just one genre of music, you're getting crap from Boris (who likes shibuya-kei and hip-hop), Francine (shibuya-kei and electronica), Gretel (shibuya-kei and mariachi), and Hortensia (shibuya-kei and rainforest sounds.) Meanwhile, I'm Scott (shibuya-kei and yé-yé), submitting my own unrelated music to this motley collection.

This works on Amazon. "People who bought this item also bought..." It doesn't work here. I don't know enough about this stuff to suggest why. I should be based on similar tags, not the habits of other people. More popular tags need to have less influence, too. The tag "female vocalists" should not have the same similarity weight as the tag "1960's Peruvian witch doctor chants in Hebrew cantorial modes." The former will tell me that since I like Judy Garland, I must like Kelly Osborne. The latter will bring up stuff that's truly related.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there because I don't know how their algorithms work. But straight up logic should tell these people "If you click a station and see 9 pictures of popular Japanese artists appear, the station should be playing these artists."

Basically, I think Web 2.0 folksonomy sites need more librarians on their staff, and it just so happens that I'm on the market for a job at a forward-looking company with good benefits and no threat of being laid-off in a year, neither of which I have at my current job. And I guess it wouldn't be SO bad moving to England and living a fabulous European lifestyle, I can make sacrifices. Any takers?