AudioPool - the Abbreviated Project Plan

On the premises of media convergence, basically unlimited media access and the ever growing cloud services like last.fm or Grooveshark radio start to make a lot of sense. Not only do you not have to actively engage in choosing your media (as music is algorithmically chosen for you based on earlier preferences), it’s also (theoretically) accessible from any device, which opens for a lot of possible expansions of the concept touching on broadcast radio.

With users having access to almost infinite amount of content, services like this become more and more necessary, as a way to navigate and find content (in this case audio) that you appreciate. With a tag system for artists and songs, and a smart algorithm mapping these, many exciting ways of getting output from audio pool seem possible. From our own ideas and based on the lecture of Claire Wardle, this platform also seem to provide good entrances for social networking, and providing ways for users to engage in each others (chosen) content and capitalize on their skills of combining and mixing it as well as creating their own content.

Here we talk of audio, and it is conscious decision. We feel that radio is a vague term, since it’s just either broadcasted audio or audio-on-demand. A service that stradles these two, with all kinds of audio content (podcasts, music, maybe even audio books), and with ways to choose what mix of content is provided (“modes”).

Since the goal of the project is to be presented at a conference we intend to design and evaluate prototypes of this system. These prototypes will primarily be intended as a demonstration of the user interaction aspects of the system. The prototype will be a sort of showcase for some of the more interesting features of the AudioPool concept.

A big part of this project will be to define and develop the concept of the listening mode. As this idea is very central to the AudioPool this will likely be one of the main things to evaluate by prototyping. How could this be implemented in the user-interface and what theories or technologies of information management could be applied.