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In memory of chicagocrime.org | Holovaty.com Adrian Holovaty explains his decision to retire chicagocrime.org (tags: chicago chicagocrime googlemaps mashup retirement) Yahoo! OpenID Provider service now available as a public beta As it says in the subject. Now to work out how to get my sites fully OpenID 2.0 compliant (tags: api authentication openid security yahoo) MySpace Developer Platform Launching on February 5th Possibly good news. I’m just waiting to see if they allow more write access to their system than facebook does. Not being able to create events programmatically is _very_ annoying. ...

Daytrotter’s Best 15 Albums of 2007: No. 5 Feist’s “The Reminder” A nice write up of a somewhat-surprising breakthrough hit (tags: daytrotter feist music top15)

The past few years have seen the English-language Ruby book market explode. Before the phenomenal success of Rails it was perfectly possible to own every available title (and not use much storage space), but now that would be quite a challenge and lead to considerable redundancy. Having worked my way through quite a few Rails books of late, reading Practical Ruby Projects—a Ruby book that doesn’t even mention web frameworks—was both a pleasant diversion and a highly illuminating experience. ...

Over the past few months, Kari and I have joined the church at St. Luke’s, West Holloway. The church building has just been renovated (and looks great) and now we’re starting to host a new series of events under the banner of “Breathing Space.” Yesterday, Martin and I got the website ready for public viewing. There’s more to come (particularly on the visual design front), but if you’re likely to be able to get to North London over the next few months take a look and see if there’s anything you’d like to join us for. ...

BLDGBLOG: Robbie Williams CDs will be used to pave roads in China EMI has announced that “unsold copies” of Rudebox, by British pop star Robbie Williams, “will soon be used to resurface Chinese roads.” (tags: cds recycling robbiewilliams) stereogum: New Gnarls Barkley - “Run” Not had a chance to listen to this yet. (tags: dangermouse gnarlsbarkley)

Every year I intend to write a “top 10 records/films/etc.” blog entry. I put it off until some time in the middle of January so I can catch up on a few releases I’d missed around the end of the year, and then either forget about it, or realise it’s too hard to reduce the list. The easiest way round that would be to just link to my listening charts for the past 12 months over on last.fm. But right now those are rolling charts (so if you look at them six months after I write this, they’ll have changed) and they’re also skewed towards records that came out early in the year. There are certainly a few highlights in there—including Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, Feist, Grinderman, Bjork, Radiohead and Panda Bear—but there are also several missing. So perhaps it’s easiest to just throw up a few notes, and then let go of this angst for another year? ...

Guillermo del Toro may take on The Hobbit | News | Guardian Unlimited Film Sounds like a good choice (tags: deltoro film hobbit tolkien)

I don’t talk much about my work here, saving the more in depth stuff for the other place, but every now and again it seems worth mentioning some new project that has launched. In spare moments over the past few weeks I’ve been setting up Future Music Talk. It’s a site that pulls together blog entries from a group of people talking about the future of the music industry, music promotion, etc. There’s a lot of good discussion taking place, but it’s all so widely spread out that it seemed helpful to bring some of it together for easy discovery and maybe some more cross-fertilisation. ...

Last.fm for television - jonathan.tweed.name An attempt to build social services around the BBC’s iPlayer, in the form of a facebook application (tags: facebook iplayer last.fm media socialtv)

Discussion about the future of the music industry abounds. Whether it’s advice for artists or labels, discussions of the release of new technologies, or predictions for the future, there’s a lot of it out there. It’s good to get a range of perspectives, but until now it’s been hard to know where to get started if you want to delve into that world. Today I’m announcing the launch of Future Music Talk, a site pulling together blog entries from a range of thinkers and practitioners. For those familiar with such things it’s a variant of the Planet-style sites so popular in the web development community (it’s powered by Planet Venus). ...