Painting by Warwick Goble

By far the most intriguing robots are the ones that get smarter as you spend more time with them. Scary? Perhaps. Although it’s also pretty cool when it comes to one of the kickin’-est internet radio out there: Pandora. Unlike other recent technology advancements which allow you to stream your favorite “on-the-ground” radio stations from any where in the world or provide you with far more choice, Pandora raises the bar by seemlessly incoporating the Web 2.0 idea of recommended content.

As part of the Music Genome Project, Pandora doesn’t search by genre, but instead looks at the components of a song or artist you like and finds similiar music. You can then either ‘yeah’ or ‘nay’ songs as they come up on your radio station. Pandora will get a better idea of what you like, as hopefully you will too, allowing you to browse the music world in true internet fashion. Pretty smart, for a robot. Makes you wonder when we’ll start to use the Human Genome Project to do the same thing…

Oh, did I mention this is free? (!) Unless you want to guarantee no-ads, which bumps the price up to $36/yr, which you may want to do considering how telling musical taste may be of self-identity. A 50-year-old who listens to Britany Spears is a different from one who listens to Beethoven. This puts into perspective just how much more invasive personal advertising has the potential to become, making this, perhaps, the robot to be most feared. Either way, in order to prepare for the inevitable, I recommend taking a look at the book: How to Survive a Robot Uprising.

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See Also: Cool Music Meets Amazing Diagrams,Sea Battle of the Bands,Facebook and UI,

This entry was posted by Jessica Pfund on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 4:57 am and is filed under Design, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.