I'm moving my blog here:

kaspernoerlund.blogspot.com

I really like Creative Libraries, but Blogger I can update with my mobile phone...

Today I did some research on the emerging phenomenon "geocaching" which is supposed to be the fastest growing hobby today!

In short geocaching is a treasure hunting game where you use a GPS to hide and seek containers with other participants in the activity.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=flsZVs4l3gU

I'm thinking of using some of the aspects of geocaching in a concept of sharing playlists.

Yesterday I borrowed the book "Music in Everyday Life" By Tia DeNora from a friend of mine. It seems like a really interesting book with some relevant texts on music and sociology.

One of the things I was told at my midway evaluation was that I wasn't fully using the potential of the mobile phone. So now I'm doing a mindmap of the functions in a modern mobile phone and the potentials of these functions.

Working hard to get ready for tuesday...

Last friday I send out "cultural probes" to four representatives from my user group. The probes are boxes filled with questionnaires and assignments. Hopefully I will get a bunch of useful data from the probes!

This friday at 11 AM there's a concert in 2nd Life with the Danish band "Carpark North". I have heard that the band have given their measures to the programmers, so it will probably be pretty realistic - anyway I'm going!

If anyone should want to go too, the coordinates are: 90, 190, 00
or click here: slurl.com/secondlife/IBM%202/92/180/22

Last thursday I had a meeting with a danish company called "Moblos". They have created an on-line community (like MySpace) for mobile phones. It might not look very flashy but that is why it performs so well on mobile phones. Unfortunately they haven't planned to integrate music in the service...

Their site is up and running, but I don't think it has been officially launched yet.






Check them out here: www.moblos.com

About a week ago I handed in my programme. In the programme I gave a more in depth description of what project is actually about. And tuesday we kickstarted the conceptual phase with a ”12 hour workshop” where we ran through the whole design process of the semester in just twelve hours –hence the name...

I ended up with concept of sharing music with your mobile phone through tags, each representing a song/album/playlist etc. I also introduced a community ”pole” where you could browse tags and profiles of those who had used the tags. The ”pole” made different levels of access possible: If you hung out near the ”pole” you could stream the music, but if you wanted to download whatever the tag represented on your mobile phone, you would have to pay.







When we did our presentations I was made aware, that some similar kind of tag-recognition software actually already exists for camera phones. It’s pretty cool and is called ”Semacode”. Check it out here: www.semacode.org

Another problem is interoperability - incompatibility of different DRM systems. This creates a situation where digital services and digital devices do not interoperate (e.g. legally downloaded WMA files won't play on an iPod).

The record labels hold the technology companies behind the major services resposible whereas the technology companies blame the major labels' demand for DRM.

One of the main obstacles of the future of digital music is that the user and the record business view each other as enemies.
The record companies don't make any money on illegal filesharing so they try to control the user's music consumption with the so called "DRM" (Digital Rights Management). This forces the user to find new and still more advanced ways to share music - and he will!

Maybe it's time to find a satisfactory solution for both parts, enabling the record business to make money AND the user to enjoy his music listening experience.

Read more:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Rights_Management
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2p

So what's the project about? Well the short story is that it's about the potentials of digital music - "Music 2.0".

"Music 2.0 sites fall into a number of camps:

Music Services - places like iTunes and Rhapsody where you can purchase or subscribe to music

Music Discovery - places that help you find music - these fall generally into 3 subcategories: Social - wisdom of the crowds sites like last.fm, iLike. Goombah and Qloud Content-based - recommendations based on the music content - Pandora, SoundFlavor, MusicIP Expert based - Music recommendations from people - music blogs, irateradio.com

Music Experience Augmentation - sites to make your music listening experience more enjoyable - music dashboards like sleevenotez or Snapp Radio Playlist

Sharing - this includes playlisting sites like MusicMobs, fiql and Webjay

Music Metadata - add to the data surrounding the music - MusicBrainz, All Music Guide, Gracenote"


Taken from music2dot0.wetpaint.com

Anyway I still don't know exactly what the outcome of the project will be, but it will definitely be some kind of service that's interoperable on a variety of platforms so you can access your musiclibrary from your mobile phone, computer, mediacenter, TV etc.

Today I have decided to blog during the proces of my final project here at Arkitektskolen Aarhus. It probably won't be much fun to read for others, but I think it will come in handy when I have to do my report in the end.

-K