Instead of sharing music in front of a computer, what if you could simply share songs, directly from your MP3 player, with friends and other people you encounter in your everyday life? Maria’s research answers this question: mainstream article & research pdf
Archive for the ‘sharing’ Category
Hulu gets it right
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
“After much confusion, it is becoming clear what works in online video …” Hulu (Hulu Who?) seems to be successful by any measure. Online video -sharing should:
- Be as simple as YouTube is cluttered
- Be Web-based; no additional software to be downloaded (Joost’s biggest flaw)
- (more importantly) Support advertising rather than charging for downloads. Hulu has only professional content, and advertisers love it. … Hulu now offers content from more than 110 partners. Plus, people watching tend to sit still, whereas people listening tend to move.
The Comedy of the Trusted Commons
Saturday, August 16th, 2008
Last week, The Economist had an interesting piece (pdf) on the tragedy of the commons.
- In 1968 Garrett Hardin, a professor of biology, published an article in the journal Science that explained “The Tragedy of the Commons”. He suggested that, from the point of view of efficiency, the commons should be replaced by systems of public or personal ownership. However, when economists began to look at how systems of commonly managed resources actually worked, they found to their surprise that they often worked quite well. Though there were failures, too, it seemed as if good management could stave off the tragedy. Before he died, Hardin admitted he should have called his article “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons”. In “Governing the Commons”, which was published in 1990, Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University described the rules needed to keep a commons going. She showed that there are almost always elaborate conventions over who can use resources and when.
It is all about en-powering people who use the common resource. Case in point from my past (luckily!) research life: people who are willing to share their Internet connections face the problem (tragedy) of free-riders – individuals who exploit the bandwidth of others without providing an adequate return. To isolate free-riders, people run trust models on their computers (pdf). A trust model is a piece of software that keeps track of who shares her connection and who doesn’t. By managing the common, trust models turn the tragedy into “The Comedy of the Managed Commons”
Underground Aesthetics: Rethinking Urban Computing
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008Yesterday I came across this terrific piece of research (pdf).
Situation: We usually see mobility as a (research) problem. So we design applications:
- For accessing info “anytime, anywhere” (When we view mobility as disconnection)
- For helping users to find interesting nearby restaurants (When mobility involves being “out of place” or lost)
- That respond to contextual cues. For example, a mobile that sets “itself automatically to vibrate mode in a theatre”. (When we view mobility as disruption)
Proposal: Some local folk (Arianna Bassoli of LSE and Karen Martin of UCL) and some folk on the other side of the pond (Johanna Brewer and Paul Dourish of UCI and Scott Mainwaring of Intel) propose to depart from our habit of viewing mobility as a problem. By contrast, they encourage designers of mobile applications to profit from movement and space. To prove the point, they have designed undersound – a music application that consists of three parts:
“1) A mobile phone client lets both emerging musicians and audiophiles wirelessly upload their tracks at upload points inside the Underground station ticket halls.
2) This same phone application lets users download tracks from download points on the train platforms as well as from other users in proximity.
3) The phone application stores metadata from each music exchange, which the upload and download access points throughout the undersound network collect and use to drive large visualizations in the ticket halls, which reflect the music’s movement through the network.”
For example, emerging musicians can get some free publicity by uploading their latest track and by adding the date of their next gig as a note to the track.
Also, their etnographic study in the Tube is well worth reading. It reminded me of what Francine Prose once wrote: “Travelers compare notes on how best to prevent their seatmates from making casual conversation. Pervesely, it’s more likely that someone might “share” a confession with a national TV audience…”
‘Ruthlessness gene’ discovered
Monday, April 7th, 2008Researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem found a link between a gene called AVPR1a and ruthless behaviour in an economic exercise called the ‘Dictator Game’.
Free book: The Future of Ideas
Thursday, January 17th, 2008You can download The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig free here (local pdf) or buy a (real) paper copy of it here.
Are you downloading copyrighted files? You are out!
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007A proposal(*) backed by French president Nicolas Sarkozy: those people who download copyrighted material (using, for example, P2P networks) will get disconnected from the Internet by their ISPs.
“Like it or not, the total cost of Internet service will rise because French ISPs have signed on to the plan. They will now spend time and (tax) money enforcing copyright on their networks via expensive deep packet inspection (DPI) software that will monitor traffic on their networks and look for copyrighted content. Subscribers detected illicitly sharing or downloading copyrighted material will receive warnings, requiring additional administrative overhead. If the behavior continues, then Internet access would be guillotined. Most of this will be carried out by a government-funded independent authority overseen by a judge” (full post).
(*) I do not describe the proposal as being insane just for this reason: “Do not be hectoring or arrogant. Those who disagree with you are not necessarily stupid or insane. Nobody needs to be described as silly: let your analysis show that he is. When you express opinions, do not simply make assertions. The aim is not just to tell readers what you think, but to persuade them; if you use arguments, reasoning and evidence, you may succeed. Go easy on the oughts and shoulds. ” You may well understand to which category Mr. Sarkozy qualifies to belong.
Can I rent your battering ram?
Friday, October 5th, 2007A very neat slideshow about reputation, made by Rentathing, that I saw on .. I’m not sure if it is working here so click on the link to Paolo’s blog if it isn’t!
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Poolcasting
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007Claudio (from IIIA and sponsored by MyStrands) gave a very interesting talk about poolcasting (pdf of his slides). Poolcasting is a web radio in which individuals may join different channels. Those subscribed to a channel will listen to the same stream of songs. The problem is how to select the songs on that stream. Claudio did so by combining the preferences of a channel´s listeners using Case-Based Reasoning.
The same approach may be used for mobile music. A bar may decide to play songs depending on the preferences of its customers (and preferences may be elicited from the playlists that customers store on their mp3 players or mobile phones).
A couple of questions that might be of interest to some of us: what if listeners do not share many songs in their playlists? Would it be possible to factor listeners´ reputation (trust) in deciding which songs to play?
Participatory Sensing starts from Web 2.0
Friday, June 8th, 2007A first step towards participatory sensing (pdf). Commissioned by the Cabinet Office, a report, called The Power of Information, aimed to find out more about Web 2.0 tools and communities to see how the government can get involved to help Britons make the most of this “new pattern of information creation and use”. (bbc news)