9 min about recommender systems for music and in general. Including statements of Last.fm and Pandora founders, Kathrin Passig, Forrester Research … and a few bits by Stephan Baumann.
(German only)
Elektrischer Reporter – Vorschlagsysteme: Mit den besten Empfehlungen
Thanks to the guys of the Repository of European Association for Semantic Web Education (REASE) my talk of this years Summer School Semantic Web is online now for free access for educational purposes. If you are interested to spend 1 hour of your valuable time, go here:
Video recording about the Social Web.
The social network thing is not at all rocket science. Back in the good ol Friendster days I was seeking around this stuff for only a few weeks … and lost interest.
Some months later I joined Open BC -now XING- in order to find interesting business contacts. So far for the masterplan, but in the end after being for 1 year a frequent user I lost interest, I made no business within this community. And even worse I still receive many many request for friendship nowadays! If you look at my activity level you should no that I am not anymore interested.
In the meantime I used Flickr, YouTube and Last.fm for the pure reason of media management and feeding my 5 or so different wordpress blogs. This was efficient and FUN! But I did not really get deep into social involvement.
I missed MySpace completely because the interface was a complete desaster of design - for my very personal taste-. At least I grabbed user names for my bands. Just to be sure to be prepared for a record deal with a major label.
And now for facebook? I missed it in the beginning because I was so fed up with all this Web2.0 service overload. I still have invitations for Joost, Twitter, Pownce, etc. everything from “media-galore” to “teenage micro-blogging”. Never used them, I have no time, I have to work. BUT something happened 3 weeks ago. I got addicted again! It started when Facebook announced the great and damn smart “Open-API-Applet-Move”. I checked in with a pseudonym just to get a feeling for the technical stuff going on there. I discovered very good groups overthere by accident, joined in, pokin around … in addition to this I was part of real good event in firstlife: the summer school semantic web. I met talented and interesting people there who meet now in Facebook. The rest of the story is straightforward: I enjoyed so much the social patterns in this special interest group that I had to change from pseudonym to my real name. And then the heatwave started again. I received invitations of very very good friends, I became part of 3-4 interest groups, people gave me positive feedback on actions, walls, my photos, etc. Social gratification by people whom I trust for their own great work and passion! I explored actively further applet features, and finally I am IN! I am so facebooked!
Sunshine vs. rain.
Athens(LSAS2006.SAMT2006) vs. Leeds(VirtualGoods2006.AXMEDIS2006).
The beauty of music and technology vs. the future of -if any- DRM.
I had 2 very different experiences in a very short amount of time. Nevertheless I gave 2 talks sharing 1 hope.
#1: The Beauty of the Beast: Semantic Audio.
#2: BluetunA: Sharing your taste in music with people nearby.
Last week I have been at the SAMT 2006 conference, giving a talk at the LSAS 2006 Workshop. I had a great time and good discussions with all the people there. Especially the spanish connection - Oscar Celma and Pedro Cano - delivered brandnew information about the future of music-related technology in semantic environments. Oscar - the so-called father of music semantic web aka foafing-the-music - had to do some powerpoint karaoke which was worth to visit. My talk about the BEAUTY OF THE BEAST: Semantic Audio contained a lot of music and videos. Therefore I still think about something beyond pure .pdf to give away for the public soon.
(1) A clock made of images depending on 2 user-tags.
via: Infosthetics.
(2) Souvenirs - a photoset by Michael Hughes, truely analog!
I had a talk at our openhouse about BluetunA, our free bluetooth-based matching of music profiles. After the talk we had a small demo setup where people could upload the application. It was more than a success. People want to have these kind of things. Early adopters (15-25 years old) of this technology are very well aware of the possibilities and pitfalls of bluetooth, mobile phone applications and proximity. I wonder why the telcos still do not realize the potential.
Joseph Weizenbaum (Berlin, January 8, 1923) is a professor emeritus of computer science at MIT.
In 1966, he published a comparatively simple program called ELIZA which demonstrated natural language processing by engaging humans into a conversation resembling that with an empathic psychologist. The program applied pattern matching rules to the human’s statements to figure out its replies. (Programs like this are now called chatterbots.) Weizenbaum was shocked that his program was taken seriously by many users, who would open their hearts to it. He started to think philosophically about the implications of Artificial Intelligence and later became one of its leading critics.
[Source: Wikipedia]
Today I received an email kindly asking for promotion of a german movie project about this great pioneer in computer science and AI. The latest news, additional information and footage are accesible via the project’s website. The official date for the premiere of the movie is 17th of November at Friedrich-Schiller Univiersity, Jena.
I had the opportunity to experiment a little bit with the Nokia 3250 (that mobile that you can fold to turn it into a music player or a camcorder). Nokia made a straightforward design on that one: you can not only make movies, but it comes also with a tiny video-editor. You can make your cuttings on-the-fly and (not tested) but theoretically there should also be some API to load the videos directly into youtube, your blog or somewhere else.
There are always pioneers, when new media emerge. In Paris there is the Pocket Films Festival the second time this year. Martin passed me a link to the Mobile FilmMakers Webpage. It is a sort of online-academie powered by Nokia with the focus on how-to make mobile movies. Seems that Nokia really hooks on that stuff and tries to extend his pole-position in that field.
Enhancements on the usability and the GUI are still required, but the mobile stuff available in stores is getting more and more interesting for creative uses and abuses. Experimentation and exploration on various new formats these days: portable gaming, podcast, videocast, moblogging and now mo-vlogging seem to make blogs an established medium in the new media circus.
I had recently the great opportunity to speak to different ISPs and telcos. They are looking for their mid-term future in a meanwhile very competitive marketplace. I generated a 17-page powerpoint-show to illustrate possibilities from a researcher’s point of view being dedicated to media, social networks and rocket science-like processing of audio+video. Since DFKI and its labs have a strong emphasis towards application-oriented research even a sketch for potential business models 2.0 is included. Ok, to be honest I refer to some really outstanding work of Alban Martin at this point, entitled “The Entertainment industry is cracked: Here is the patch.” Nevertheless these 17 pages are kind of a one-stop-all-inclusive overview of the research and according markets we aim at here at C4. Download the .pdf here and enjoy! …and comment!