Practicum #2- Brian Oliver

February 23rd

Moving forward in my research from my fist blog post, I started spending some time examining the search features on Blip.fm. While exploring this feature on the website, I found something particularly intriguing. Blip.Fm lets you search members of Blip.fm, by artists they have blipped in the past. The coolest thing about this feature is that it lets you search for blip users by multiple artists simultaneously. For example, on Blip.fm you can create a search that only looks for members who have blipped Metallica before. However, you can also refine your search even further by searching for blip members who have blipped songs from multiple artists. For my search I looked for a Blip member who has blipped at least one song from Metallica, 2pac, and Britney Spears in the past. When I typed this into the search, there was only one DJ, Capoal_Chief, who had blipped a song from all three of these artists. I thought this was interesting, and I began to do this with other artists who don’t seem to go together, or some of my favorite artists that are a little obscure, such as Pain of Salvation, matched with artists who are popular, Britney Spears. It was fascinating to see people who had such eclectic musical tastes. I spent a very long time doing this, because I really was interested to see if people who blipped a specific artist would also blip something from an artist in a completely different genre of music.

Another thing that I realized during this search and exploring the many profiles on Blip.fm was that the members with the “sexiest photos” had the most listeners and “props.” My definition of popularity is: A DJ’s popularity can be assumed to be positively correlated with the number of props and listeners a DJ had. I wanted to be a popular DJ, and the picture that I posted on blip.fm was not particularly sexy. It was a picture of me with a scarf on. So, I thought that maybe changing my picture to something a little more sexy would grab other members’ attention and maybe become an attractive DJ for them to follow. I made the switch and continued to look at the profiles of other blip members through the search feature and the profiles in my news feed. I decided to become a listener of some of these like UaturalSoul because we both had a common interest in the band Dream Theater.