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:

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?

I'm finally getting around to posting this link to a piece that ran in the New Yorker back in August.  The column starts out as a discussion of the considerable recent advances in encoding and cleansing music in digital form: more than ever, it is possible to enhance the depth and quality of the captured performances and to enrich the sense of the time and place of those performances while eliminating the "noise" that obscures that richness.  As bandwidth and