i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Here’s a great example of a multimedia Personal Information Management system. Gregg Gillis, the artist behind the musical mash-up sensation Girl Talk, discusses on NPR how he organizes the music he samples in his work. Here is the most interesting quote about his system:

 http://mapofmetal.com/

For the uninitiated, metal music seems to fall under these general descriptors: long hair, loud and aggressive vocals, fast guitar solos, and lyrics that are probably about killing people.

Google completely revolutionized the way search was performed when it brought out the concept of Page Rank in webpages. Pages which were "legitimate" so to speak were given more weight as compared to the others and this started the prolific trend of SEO companies that we see today. Trying to make your website more "friendly" for the spider to take notice of you and increase the number of back links to your websites using numerous link building measures only seemed to add to the choreographed process of Search Engine Optimization.

Is Qwiki the multimedia search engine of the future?

For those of you in Section C, you may recall when Rami mentioned that a startup named Qwiki, working on a multimedia information retrieval service, had won the grand prize of the venture competition at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference.

They have now moved into alpha, allowing testers to use their system and provide feedback. You can request an invite at http://www.qwiki.com or email me for one.

What is Qwiki?

If you have an experience using touch-screen devices such as cellphone, e-book readers, or ATM, you might be a person who is awkward or clumsy to manipulate some electronic devices which are not equipped with touching screens. Nowadays, it is so natural that people try to touch the screen when they grab a brand-new mobile device because touching screens has seeped into their daily lives.

While the whole world is going crazy over social networking, how can Apple be behind? Steve Jobs has taken it upon himself to make people think of Apple, as a Social networking company, on the lines of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others. But will Apple succeed in changing people's mindsets? Only time will tell, meanwhile, check out the powerful list of social media offerings by Apple: