Duke Listens!: On the stairway to the Celestial Jukebox - a blog by Paul Lamere

Perhaps you remember the Google Image Labeler, a game where you try to guess what labels your partner will apply to an image.  Michael Mandel, (when not dodging NYC bullets) has developed a similar game for music called MajorMiner.   The goal of the game is to label songs with original, yet relevant words and phrases that other players agree with.  

Of course the game is just a thinly disguised method of collecting data about music. But it is fun, addicting, and the data helps the excellent music tech team at LabROSA.

I'm currently number 4 on the leader board. The neat thing is that your score can go up even when you are not playing as other players select tags that you've already applied.

The game itself is well designed. I like especially like how the scoring rules work. Once a label has been applied a couple of times, you can't score any more points for that label.  Without this rule, you could just type 'rock' for each song without even listening and climb the leader board.  The game has a good, minimalistic web design - no Ajax for Ajax sake.  All in all, well done - and it will be interesting to see what kind of data Michael collects,  and  how the MajorMiner tags  compare to tags that people apply at last.fm.