(composite image via Flickr and Pandora.com)

I know that Spotify is all the rage, but it doesn’t have a public release in the US yet, and invites are still a bit rare States side. So, I’ve been finally playing around with Pandora at work, and came to the realize that there is real intelligence and even, fortune telling in Pandora’s recommendation engine.

When Paula asked me a question about what project she should work on next, Pandora voluntarily kicked out Anyway You Want It by Journey, which made us stop in our tracks (so to speak.) It only took me a moment to realize the potential wisdom that Pandora imparts. Ask it a question, wait for the next song, and get an answer.

It’s like magic or visiting a psychic, only better because it’s free and you can hum or sing along. The answers are also much more interesting than the static answers from the standard Magic 8 ball. Plus it gives you something to do while Gmail is down.

Here is an actual record of our questions and Pandora’s answers.

Paula: What will my roommate be like?
Enjoy the Silence, Depeche Mode

(We’re not sure if this good or bad?)

Me: How am I going to like my apartment?

This Must Be The Place I Waited Years to Leave, Pet Shop Boys

(Honest!)

Susan: What am I going to have for dinner?
Toxic, Britney Spears

Paula: What am I going to be when I grow up?
Man Eater, Nelly Furato

Susan: What am I going to do for Labor Day?
Drive, The Cars

Ray: How is my project going?
Calabria 2008, Enur… you know that song, which was played in every retail store for the past two years, and finally made it to that “dance battle” Target commercial. Not sure how that applies to my current work project. Oh Pandora, just when we think we understand you, you uphold your mysterious ways.

Try it out, and let me know how it goes!

My friend Alex sent me this link to this recent JC de Castelbajac video, which reconsiders his recent runway show as LEGOs.  JCDC is known for incorporating popular culture imagary into his couture, but this is taking the concept into new levels. The Anna Wintour as a plastic toy is just too good. Below are screen grabs, a still from the animated show, the actual Spring/Summer 2009 show, as well as, Ms. Wintour. I’ve let you go to the site watch the entire video (which I highly encourage) and find Kanye West in the first row. In the confusing time of economic uncertainty and post-election optimism. The show itself leans toward the hopeful, with rainbow colors and plastic hats. Obama’s portrait even makes a showing.  Amidst the gloom of two wars, the shrinking global economy, and pummelled stock market, is this the perfect time for play and reinvention?

The last week has been a little hectic. I give this talk last week to some first year Masters of ID students at UArts. The title is “Compuation + Maps.” I’m not sure how much of it will make sense without the spoken part, but the basic ideas should be discernable. I’m looking forward to going back in a couple of weeks to see their projects.

On a rainy Friday, here are some follow up tidbits to some previous posts that have been collecting in my mental Inbox. I think it’s a good practice to follow up on posts. In both blogging, even more importantly traditional journalism, the story after the story is too often neglected.

1. A few kind readers have asked me about the other youtube famed video, D.A.N.C.E., by French techno duo Justice. While it is a great track and video, I still like DVNO better. Superimposing motion graphics on a shirts is a brilliant idea, however the visual effects prowess of the creators overtakes the visual imagery. The viewers spends a lot of time thinking, how did they do that? and what a cool effect. DVNO required a similar level of design skill (with albeit less rotoscoping.) As stated before, in the case of DVNO, the technology is invisible and the viewer can focus on the imagery.

2. The game designer who created Passages, which I alluded to as work of interactive fiction, has created a new work called, Gravitation.

3. From March 1 to March 31, Google blog search reveals: 16,526 results for awesomenessand 706,055 results for awesome, which is lower than the results from my original post:February-2008: Awesomeness: 17,182 ; Awesome: 736,783 ; Are: 61,531,049
January-2008: Awesomeness: 9,627 ; Awesome: 429,769; Are: 57,214,958

Is the use of “awesomeness” leveling of?
I’m not sure. The results that Google is now giving me is different results for previous months when I first collected data, which is a little troubling.

However, if I really want to understand how search engines work, I may have to try to read this suggestion from Wojciech, Introduction to Information Retrieval, by Standford profressors, Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze.

Frank pointed out some clever research at Microsoft Research. Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec parsed through one month of MSN messenger communication, or about 1 billion conversations a day. Among the 240 million users, they discovered an average of 6.6 degrees of separation between any two random users. 6.6 is obviously close to the famed six degrees of separation found in Milgram’s 1967 study. Although, some debate still continues on the validity of that finding. Horvitz made the full paper available, and has really in depth analysis of the spread of MSN Messenger and the communication it facilitates. The image above shows the density of users. The numbers of user shift from high to low according to the light spectrum, with red as high and blue as low (think ROYGBIV.) Since this finding, Horvitz wonders if there is some larger phenomenon at work, with six being some natural average of social interconnectedness. More thoughts to keep me up at night.

Via (Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends)