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!)

Blue Tuna Website
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.