So LoudCrowd, what's this all about then?

A student waiting to see me this morning told me that she was getting into LoudCrowd, which I'd read about on Epicenter but still haven't found time to try out.

Conduit Labs' LoudCrowd, co-founded by former Harmonix employee Dan Ogles, generated tons of buzz with its Tuesday SXSW announcement of a social music gaming network, somewhat along the lines of Guitar Hero meets MySpace. After playing around with the LoudCrowd site for a bit today, we feel like that hype is somewhat justified.

The second paragraph has the twist -- using music discovery as the reward incentive for playing.

One of the coolest things about LoudCrowd is that it makes you want to earn virtual money by playing games to collect actual music. When we won our first track after performing well in a DJ game, we were thrilled even before we heard it. This is an intriguing way to get people excited about music, because it encourages active listening.

So I'm going to try it out at some point soon. Anyone else playing it already?

A mind less bound by the parameters of perfection? Sez who?

The ideas expounded upon in this Epicenter Q&A with Vint Cerf -- one of the "creators" of the Internet and now Chief Information Evangelist at Google -- on Recession, Recovery, and Innovation in Hard Times are not music/game specific, but both businesses will benefit from paying attention to what he has to say. And I never knew that he looks almost exactly like The Architect from The Matrix, which in a way makes sense.