Top albums of 2011: Spotify playlists

At this time of year I tend to search out some of the best albums lists churned out by websites, magazines, record shops and so on to see what I might’ve missed over the past year (those things do serve some purpose). A good starting place is Metacritic, which rounds up a load of top 10’s from various sources.

This year I’m looking for Spotify playlists of those top albums so I can skip through them and transfer anything that sounds decent to my ‘New stuff to listen to’ playlist. Those playlists aren’t too easy to find though – I’d have thought people would have started putting them together as a matter of course, but apparently not (although that’s probably fair enough in the case of the record shops).

Anyway, here’s a starter list. I’ll add to it as and when I find more:

Most of these are full albums. If there’s just one track from each then I’ve labelled that ‘sampler’.

A single, aggregated playlist might be good. Maybe next year there’ll be something like a Metacritic Spotify app for this. Oh, and I should point out that not every album is on Spotify, so not all of these playlists are 100%.

Arts, culture and what’s on mailing lists

Mailing lists are great. Sign up to one and, on a regular basis, suggestions for interesting things to do will drop into your inbox. What’s not to love about that? They’re especially good for getting to grips with a new city.

The problem is that they’re sometimes not all that easy to discover. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a handy mailing list repository that anyone can search. So I thought I’d kick something off.

Here’s a spreadsheet of what’s on mailing lists:

I’m pretty certain there are more than this, so…

Help me add to the list

If you know of any other what’s on mailing lists then fill out this very quick form.

If there’s anything wrong on the spreadsheet (for example, dodgy URLs or long-dead lists) or if you can think of any ways to improve this then please leave a comment below.

NB: Ideally, I’m looking for what’s on mailing lists that cover events in a particular geographic areas (regions, cities, etc). I’m not looking for the mailing list for your individual venue/theatre company/band/whatever.

I’ll check for submissions and update the spreadsheet above on a semi-regular basis. I’d open it up more, but I’ve seen this sort of thing get abused by spammers before so am going to take on a bit of admin to prevent that.

A couple of thanks

With thanks to Jake Orr (@jakeyoh) for kinda prompting me to do this and Alex Jones (@jones_alex) for kicking off this list a little while back.

Links for 7 December 2011

Let’s start with something that made me nod my head quite a bit. It’s a post titled Digitally-literate staff are key to charity digital success and it’s a slightly better written version of a rant that I sometimes go off on. The whole thing’s worth but these bits will give you a flavour:

…the things that stand in the way of digital success. Internal politics, lack of money, lack of evidence, legacy technologies and lack of experience…

It’s one thing to deliver a fabulously interactive website, but if you don’t have the resources behind it to keep it running, it’ll be just window-dressing

No longer can those skills be the preserve of the harried and over-stretched digital teams. We have passed the tipping point where digital is something new, it just is

Moving on, I’m really not sure what to make of The Space. It’s “an experimental digital arts media service and commissioning programme” which doesn’t explain a great deal but there’s money and the BBC’s name attached, so people have jumped on it regardless.

The last arts funding cow to be fed to the raptors was the ACE/NESTA R&D Fund, with details of the commissioned projects now starting to emerge. For instance, over the next year the IWM Social Interpretation team will be regularly posting about their in trying to integrate social media models into museums’ outputs. It’s good to see these processes being documented in this way.

The abridged version of Mia Ridge’s notes for her talk, Open for engagement: GLAM audiences and digital participation have some good tips for designing participatory projects. In other talk-related blog posts, Hugh Wallace spoke about Beautiful small things at the National Gallery of Ireland’s 2011 Symposium, presenting five  projects that he believes exemplify good practice in digital media with an emphasis on the audience.

Arts/digital links

  • Arte TV livestreamed La Boheme from a council block in Berne, with online viewers able hop between different camera angles. I’m really disappointed to have missed this.
  • Silk was created by Yuri Vishnevsky as an experiment in generative art. It’s lovely.
  • Details and links to all of the hacks produced during Culture Hack North.
  • Mobile Museum is a series of semi-structured written interviews with people who have developed, authored or managed mobile projects.
  • StageScan aims to give personalised theatre recommendations based on what you’ve liked in the past, letting you follow individual creatives and/or critics. It’s kinda like the missing link between Theatricalia and Journalisted.
  • Far too many infographics are rubbish but this one showing how much artists earn online (including last.fm, spotify, retail albums and mp3 downloads) is very good.
  • PressBooks lets you author and output books in multiple formats, including epub, Kindle, print-on-demand-ready PDF, HTML and inDesign-ready XML. Could be handy.
  • The results are in on the steve.museum’s research project: Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums. They found that museum professionals and the general public speak different languages and that a high percentage of user-submitted tags were useful.
  • On that theme, Brooklyn Museum’s Gallery Tag! is a pretty simple mobile tagging game, specifically designed for use in the gallery.

Other links

Some apps and services

Finally

A barnstorming Gary Vaynerchuk keynote at Inc5000.

Continue reading “Links for 7 December 2011”