I stumbled across a very cool little plugin yesterday: Audioscrobbler. This little service will send your music playing history to Audioscrobbler’s servers, so that other people can see what you’re listening to at any given moment…

1. FOAF is broken. It’s been broken in three different ways over the past 2 months, All PHP errors. Audioscrobbler’s code is never very well tested before it goes live, and it has a history of being broken for a long time.

2. RDF output is bad. It’s not good RDF, and it describes all the songs you’re listening to as being the same song. Since it doesn’t use anything other than titles, it doesn’t know how to find a musicbrainz ID, doesn’t look like it will at any point in the future, and as such, the RDF output is completely broken.

3. Web services for text output don’t split the data up, so there’s no way to be sure that a specific field is first. I’ve still done some working with this format, and created the MeNow Implementation based on it. However, this has broken on me in the past two, meaning that it breaks the tools.

The primary concern is the fact that the artist and title aren’t described in a usable way in anything, and the fact that I need to then aggregate this data myself, which is a pain. So, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve created at a prototype level.

crsmith.net has an interesting entry on using RDF data from MusicBrainz to export information about the music tracks he’s currently listening to, and how it’ll allow him to link that information to, for instance, license data, review information, FOA…