De parte del mismo profesor de antropología de la Universidad de Kansas que me inspiró a hacer el primer post de este blog, me refiero a Michael Wesch, ahora encuentro complacido en You Tube el siguiente video elaborado con sus alumnos:
¿Realmente la tecnología mejorará el sistema educativo que existe en el mundo hasta ahora? ¿Hará del mundo más justo en esta materia? ¿Hasta dónde es bueno que cada persona se especialice al máximo y no sepa absolutamente nada de otras cosas? Estas y otras cuestiones chocan en mi cabeza.
Por ahora sólo un gracias Wesch y a seguir la discusión en su blog Digital Ethnography, en el cual di cuenta de otro gran video, titulado Information R/evolution, en el que Wesch ,magistralmente, muestra la evolución que ha enfrentado la forma en que la humanidad almacena la información en los últimos años. Un maestro.
At work, usually its Enrique who has the music playing for the whole office. And though he uses a number of internet radio sites, his favorite had always been Pandora, until licensing issues closed it for international users. Since our restriction, both him and I have been swapping internet radio sites that we find, trying to find one that kept the music flowing as we used to have it. Quite simply, nothing matched up.
What we most miss about Pandora was the capacity it had to take a song or artist, and offer recommendations that were similar and totally new based on filtered criteria (of over 400 variables, based in a study called the Music Genome Project). We would input a song or artist, and were amazed at how often we would find new artists we never heard of before that we enjoyed.
The way he measures the quality of an internet radio site is in the amount of times he manually skips songs (an advantage internet radio has over satellite and terrestrial). With Pandora, it would run for hours.
And then an amazing point occured to him as he discussed this with me. The business of recommendations is already well covered (by a monster like Amazon). But with something as popular as music, as accessible as one song, and as tangible as radio, the value of a database with this kind of capability is staggering. And whats more, its based in an extensive musical study. Now, they´ve started plans for bridging their service for mobile distribution. What else could Pandora have planned for their database? What other applications in music could this be potentially used for?
Screen capture of the Pandora interface
--- UPDATE! --- CBS just bought Last.fm for $280 million, possibly an indication of where Internet Radio is headed. However, with this site, Enrique´s skip-track-rate was way too high. Story and Analysis
