Contextual Browsing: Music

by Fraser on May 14, 2008 · Comments

shadow-puppets-0514.pngOn May 11th I had two related ah-hah moments. Here’s what happened.

It was midday when I jumped over to Twitter and saw an update from Alex that he was digging The Last Shadow Puppets. The Last Shadow Puppets? No hint what it was but I clicked through the tinyurl, not sure what to expect.

Ah. A music group. Inspired by Bowie. One half of the band being Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys.

I was sold. Instantly.

What happened next - and the fact that I took it for granted at the time - is awesome.

After reading the bio and listening to the free songs I found myself craving more. My mouse wandered up to the SmartMenu where I clicked through to get more music on the Hype Machine.

With the soundtrack playing I right-clicked on the band’s name to access the in-text SmartMenu. BlueOrganizer recognized that I was looking at a music page and that the text I was interacting with was an album. Presented in the SmartMenu was the option to look the band up on Pitchfork.

pitchfor-0514.png

A click later I was reading the review for the album on the site. Reading this sealed the deal for me: “the change in the scale of Turner’s songwriting is ultimately more profound… these songs are Tolstoy in their bird’s-eye omniscience.”

pitchfork2-0514.pngAnd so I clicked on the SmartMenu again, clicked through to find the band on Amazon, and was brought to my final destination, a place to buy this delicious album.

Two ah-hahs. One, this album is awesome. Two, experiencing the contextual web for music - that is, collapsing my favourite music sites around a single band and album - is awesome. I was able to get what I wanted - from diverse areas of the web - instantly and without searching for it thanks to the contextual browsing capabilities of BlueOrganizer.

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