Strands Blog

Nice job Bryan!

Open to anything. We believe the smartest devices should keep getting smarter. That’s why we’ve left the Nokia Nseries open to enhancement, experimentation and evolution.

Phones should be open to anything… is the new marketing campaign Nokia is running that features some cool applications, such as MyStrands Social Player, YouTube, the GPS… Click here to see the demo (and click on MyStrands within the demo to see entire campaign).

You might be a geek if you go to unconferences for fun but for women who went to She’s Geeky, that is just fine. Unlike any gathering of brilliant minds I have been to, the first order of the day was lunch. Kaliya Hamlin, Identity Woman, organizer and Queen Bee, said that food and drink were a big deal. “Everything else just falls into place.”

Women came from as far as New York City. Attendees ran a full spectrum of ages and interests which made the “Un” in the conference so amazing. There were so many topics to choose from such as video blogging and live stream, public speaking, or just how to say NO.

I had such a great time meeting these amazing women. The power in numbers was felt there. You can see for yourself in the She’s Geeky video…

And some cool photos here.

Stephanie X, VideoGeek

I had the pleasure of attending the ACM Recommender Systems Conference, as part of the research division of MyStrands (as well as a participant in the associated doctoral consortium). I was also offered the opportunity to discuss a few of the papers and “themes” of the conference in more detail here as a guest blogger.

There were too many ideas and themes that interested me this year, but in particular, I was very interested to hear Khrishna Bharat, principle scientist at Google, give the keynote. Greg Linden from Findory gives a good overview, which I won’t repeat. Dr. Bharat’s talk was a very detailed argument of journalism as a necessary cultural function, and not just a reflection (or exaggeration) of online novelty and whim.

His main argument was of journalism and free press being a necessary agent (and product of) democracy. While Google News has come under fire for potentially undermining the economic viability of online journalism, Krishna argues that Google News actually increases traffic to such sites.

However, much of his emphasis (and closing remarks), came in his discussion of the journalists who risk their lives to cover developments in hostile international countries and situations. Many people may have better tools and options for the exploration and discovery of relevant news items, especially in the realm of technical or entertainment journalism. However, the biggest threat to journalism as an agent of democracy may be the increasing number of reporters killed pursuing their trade.

Any sort of news is a function of three populations: Those who collect and distill the event into words, those who editorialize and sort these events into meaningful chunks of information, and finally those of us who consume this information. All of the technology in the world cannot replace a single journalist, and Bharat believes that this is actually one of the most important issues for journalism in general, both online or print.

Justin Donaldson, Researcher, MyStrands

We just made it supremely easy for MyStrands users to launch music video channels from every Artist and User page. You will notice a new link on each that says “Watch the <artist/username> Channel on MyStrands.TV”.

Just click the link to open a new tab/window and enjoy the show. For artists, we will launch you into a virtually endless stream of their music videos, interviews and coverage from their live shows. For users, we create the channel based on content they listen to, like, and have not yet discovered yet but we think they will be into. Listen to yours, or listen to someone else’s! Want to know what I’m into, just check it out:

http://www.mystrands.com/musick_in_the_head

Now so simple even my mother could do it!