Streaming Media

An Early Start...The last day of AoIR 2004 has dawned on us. I've had the bad luck to have been given the 8.30 a.m. timeslot for my own paper - standing in an empty theatre at the moment waiting for people to finish their breakfast and make their way here. The session I'm in - ostensibly on 'online news and journalism/Internet vs. traditional media' - contains a pretty eclectic bunch of papers, so we'll see how many will show up in the end… They have ten more minutes.

Finally met Jill Walker during the break! Now on to the next panel - but it's very dark in here so I'll apologise in advance for any typing errors. Mary Flanagan and Ken Perlin are presenting on their RAPUNSEL project. The motivation is that very few of the programmers and other IT professionals in the US are women (7%), so the project is to develop a game to attract girls to the area. The main drop-off point for interest amongst girls is around middle school, but they are and remain very interested in online gaming (over 60% of the gamers in Sims Online are women). The project builds on this by using 'computer clubhouses' in poor and ethnically diverse neighbourhoods in New York (which are sponsored by Intel). The combination of everyday desires and technology enables the expression of a possible world (building on Deleuze). So how can hacker and middle-schooler cultures be connected in this way?

As if the music industry didn't have enough to worry about: Slashdot reports that users are now Shifting from P2P to Stream Ripping - that is, using their computers to 'tape' online radio stations 24 hours a day. Quality is good (and getting better); song IDs enable sorting and selection of incoming songs - as broadband spreads and bandwidth increases, this virtually untraceable brute-force approach to downloading music might really become a viable alternative...

Doing more work on my M/C Journal article for the 'fight' issue today. It was accepted for publication with some requests of further changes by the refeerees. One referee wondered about the impact of CD burning and filesharing on CD sales, so I did a bit more research and rediscovered a nice article at The Register which questions the RIAA's claims using its own figures.

Another pointer on Slashdot, to a Wired article about the problems for large entertainment corporations as they support the RIAA's war on online music exchange systems (filesharing and Webcasting in particular).