Before I joined the Echo Nest I worked in the research lab at Sun Microsystems. During my tenure at Sun I maintained a blog called ‘Duke Listens!’ where I wrote about things that I was interested in (mostly music recommendation, discovery, visualization, Music 2.0). When Oracle bought Sun a few years back they shut down the blogs for ex-employees and Duke Listens! was no more. However, a kind soul named John Henning spent quite a bit of time writing perl scripts to capture all the Duke Listens data. He stuck in on a CD and gave it to me. It has been sitting on my computer for about a year. This weekend, while hanging out on the Music Hack Day IRC I wrote some python (thanks BeautifulSoup), reformatted the blog posts, created some indices and pushed out a static version of the blog.
You can now visit the Duke Listens! Archive and look through more than a 1,000 blog posts that chronicle the 5 years of Music 2.0 history (from 2004 to 2009). Some favorite posts:
- My first MIR-related post (June 2004)
- My first hardcore MIR post (January 2005)
- A very wrong prediction about Apple (January 2005)
- I discover Radio Paradise (April 2005)
- First Google Music rumor (June 2005)
- First Amazon Music rumor (August 2005)
- First Pandora Post (September 2005)
- First mention of The Echo nest (October 2005)
- Why there’s no Google Music search (December 2005)
- First mention of Spotify (January 2007)
- My review of Spotify (November 2007)
- The Echo Nest goes live (March 2008)
- The Echo Nest launches their API (September 2008)
- My first look at iTunes genius recommendations (September 2008)
- My last post (February 2009)
Music Machinery 