MIT Replicating Robin Blandford

MIT IS TRYING to replicate elements of work already developed, tested and deployed single-handedly by award-winning DCU student Robin Blandford. The MIT product ports its interface onto a phone. Blandford's was web-based, viewable and listenable on a smart phone without any plug-ins.

PC Magazine reports, "MIT's RadioActive project, which Judith Donath created with student Aaron Zinman, defines a large-scale asynchronous audio messaging system, or mobile audio forum. In this system, voice messages, which are short audio sound bytes, are exchanged between groups of users via mobile devices, like cell phones or PDAs, as a method of discussion-on-demand. 

"The messages are then collected in threads similar to how a common Internet discussion forum, like discuss.pcmag.com or even Slashdot, organizes text posts. Each message contains a subject, body, and author, as well as other metadata, and can range the spectrum from quick blurbs to full-length podcasts."

During the past academic term, we passed around a mobile phone in my Media Writing class at Tipperary Institute and students called Blandford's Commentcasting service to offer two-minute snippets that they quickly cobbled together as revision files for audio playback. This parallels part of the MIT project--and it is done and dusted already.

 

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MIT Electronic Lens Project
Robin Peterson -- "MIT plans to convert cellphone users into podcasters"
Commentcasting -- for feeds or individual audio snippets.

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Comments

[Robin Blandford]

Thanks Bernie! Someone remind me to schedule lunch with Negroponte next week! lol.

[Aaron Zinman]

I'm the author that you claim was TRYING to rip off some guy's project that I've never even heard of. I tried going to the guy's page, but unfortunately the site is down so I can't see the interface I supposedly ripped off. Either way, I can tell you that nothing about the project was trying to rip anyone off, and if your award-winning DCU student had actually published the work (assuming its relevance) I might have actually seen it.

Further, from what I've been able to tell of the project, the only thing about it that's the same is using audio as a medium. The PCMag article incorrectly used the word podcasting, when RadioActive is simply about large-scale audio-based chat forums for mobiles. If you had actually gone to the website for the project, you would have seen that. Further, it is specifically oriented towards mobiles. One designs differently for the web, knowing you have a large display, keyboard, and mouse, and is the reason why its in audio in the first place. RadioActive is also an academic project that focused on techniques of navigating large-scale persistant audio archives, in particular by focusing on visualization.

Thus RadioActive is not an attempted rip off at all, nor is it even the same the project. But I'm glad that you've felt the need to say so without even asking me in the first place.

Aaron

[Bernie Goldbach]

The original post did not claim rip-off. The two functionalities have similar handling characteristics--mobile messaging being the common thread in both.

Robin Blandford's work was widely published in Ireland and was peer-reviewed by Reuters in London. I also read the original dissertation before writing this post months ago.

It would have been interesting to connect the main players in the college projects but that's not a normal pathway for third level research in Ireland.