MusicBrainz at the BBC

Tom writes about the upgrade to www.bbc.co.uk/music that now uses MusicBrainz IDs for artists, albums and tracks. Plus the album reviews are now under a Creative Commons license and are microformatted with hReview and hCard. Read his post to find out why this is so important and how it will expand the potential of this information.

Michael's obviously been a busy man - what with this and the prototype clickable tracklistings for Hackday.

Update: More info up on the MusicBrainz site

At hackday

It's hackday at Alexandra Palace and the building's been struck with lightning. We've just got power and wifi back and we're back inside.

We just finished our talk in time - "Things to Make and Do with Radio and Music". It should be online soon. Our hackday box can be found here...

http://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org/

It's got links to all the apps and data feeds we talked about including...

• The Moose 6 music discovery game


• The John Peel and Top of the Pops apps and data


• RadioPlayer data


• Incoming SMS feeds


• etc.

Have fun hacking...

BBC Audio & Music at Hackday

We're frantically getting things ready for Hackday on Saturday. We're pulling together some new apps, data and feeds from BBC Audio & Music for the weekend. I can't say too much right now but there'll be stuff to do with Top of the Pops and John Peel (interesting combination), SMS messages and also a sneak preview of one of our latest projects, code-named Moose 6. We may also have some prizes for the best radio- or music-related hack.

And our session details are now up on the Hackday backnetwork.

Things to Make and Do (with music and radio)

By Chris Bowley and Tristan Ferne

Tristan and Chris will talk about how they build things at BBC Audio & Music Interactive, give some top tips on making prototypes and reveal some new APIs and data you might want to use to hack music and radio. All done using the medium of album titles.

They'll be several of us at Hackday and we hope to see you there.

Fractals in African architecture

An intriguing post from Ethan Zuckerman on how African architecture and craft seems to have fractal geometry, yet these patterns aren't present in Pacific or native American cultures.

Ron Eglash, whose study it is, an ethnomathematician. What's ethnomathematics?

"The term was coined by Ubiratan D'Ambrosio to describe the mathematical practices of identifiable cultural groups. It is sometimes used specifically for small-scale indigenous societies, but in its broadest sense the "ethno" prefix can refer to any group -- national societies, labor communities, religious traditions, professional classes, and so on. Mathematical practices include symbolic systems, spatial designs, practical construction techniques, calculation methods, measurement in time and space, specific ways of reasoning and inferring, and other cognitive and material activities which can be translated to formal mathematical representation. The ISGEm strives to increase our understanding of the cultural diversity of mathematical practices, and to apply this knowledge to education and development."

I think this requires further reading (here maybe).