This is the first of many interviews from the incredible CHI 2007 conference I went to last May. More on all that later. Let's get started! I have a ton of interviews to get up here...and they all tie back in to my Second Life research, and my continued interest in technologies that help us improve our lives and help us learn.
(CHI 2008 is in Florence, Italy -- see you there!)
Interview part 1 of many with:
Stephan Baumann
Head of Competence Center Computational Culture at the
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
Quicktime (7 MB)
IPOD version (M4V 9 MB)
MP3 (2MB)
Transcription:
Me: So tell me about Blue Tuna.
Stephan: Blue Tuna is a new kind of application where you can share your music tastes with people near by. So it's like augmenting First Life. Having a First Life again. Meeting people who share the same music tastes. That's a great socializer I think. So if you are a little bit shy, and want to get into a conversation, you could check with a mobile phone to see who in a close proximity has my tastes, and then you could walk up and have coffee or beer and talk about music and...yeah whatever.
Me: And how can you tell that this user will have similar tastes to the other users, and stuff like that?
Stephan: Ah ok. So, when you MP3s on your mobile phone -- with the new generation of cell phones, this will be no problem -- We can read out the ID3 tags, so the song name, the artist name, the title name. This is part of it. And another thing is that we could connect to these socal bookmarking music sites, such as Last.fm, and there you can track down the profile of your listening behavior to get an even richer profile. And then we compute a kind of similarity match based on how many artists are in common between two people...how many related artists are in common...This is pretty straightforward.
 | Friend me in SL - I'm Haley Bailey
- and I'll send you a
Mefeedia T-shirt you can wear in
Second Life.
So I'm learning how to program and build objects and buildings in Second Life, and I can tell that I've found a new obsession for sure. As I mentioned above, my SL name is "Haley Bailey." I extend the usual offer to "friend me." I'm still hanging out for the most part at my friend Ryce Broderick's place. He's David Meade in meatspace -- Teleport Now - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Gyeongju/106/166/73 I met a lot of other ethnographers and researchers at CHI 2007 last week. We're all going to share data! Yippie! |
I don't understand the whole "wasting time in SL" thing though, because I am definitely learning technical and cultural skills while I'm in there.
There's so much culture and social intrigue in world. And it's not necessarily a substitution for meatspace.
I'm getting more into meatspace too! There's a new vlog on the way!
But my point is that it's really the instances of the virtual world's bleeding over into meatspace that fascinate the hell out of me. Why I decided to start writing up tutorials and tours of SL. (Tour index on the way.)
