It takes images, video and music from the Getty archives and mashes them up into a constant stream of material, which the viewer can modify according to their mood by entering their ‘emotional state’: you can be hot or cold, excited or calm, nostalgic or contemporary. Moodstream then selects content according to your criteria and pushes content out to you accordingly. The result is a rather peculiar kind of moving audio wallpaper, a bit like high tech elevator music, and I’m not entirely sure what the point is, unless its meant to be projected in the background in your office or home. Still, its kind of fun, and an interesting insight into how media might be personally tailored in future, where you will feel like things are being done specifically for you rather than just a generic audience.

In the same vein is this wonderful presentation by Alisa Miller, the CEO of Public Radio International of shows why we get the news we deserve. by mashing stats on seconds of airtime given to news stories on US networks, it comes up with a compelling argument why US foreign policy bears no relation to the understanding of the world of its citizens.

watch it here http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/248

This is from the inspiring and entertaining TED talks series, which i watch every week or so, almost at random, to be amazed and educated at what the world contains. i’ll post periodically from them, as they are one of the best things on the web in my opinion, and since actually attending a TED conference costs thousands of dollars, getting them for free is a real bargain

anyone who witnesses an incident or has information on it can send in a report and the data is added to both the map and a searchable database: the map can show incidents by type (e.g. arson, rape, murder) and or date. This gives an immediate sense of the scale and distribution of the situation in real time.

One of the pioneers of this type of approach is http://chicago.everyblock.com/ (formerly chicagocrime.org, see the story on its development at http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2008/01/31/0102) which mashes information from police, local government, businesses etc with a detailed city map to provide an amazing amount of useful stuff on local neighbourhoods: from crime rates and types to building permits and more. Founded by Adrian Holovaty, one of the pioneers of interactive online journalism, it has grown to cover New York and San Fransisco as well as Chicago.

This is a viable alternative to making local news exciting, the ability to ‘drill down’ into your local area on a street by street level is tremendously powerful.

This puts me in mind of charlie beckett’s post a few days ago about the parochial yet over the top nature of US news, and how UK local news is no where near as comprehensive, nor as energetic. This kind of mapping of local news trends is a potential answer to the conundrum of how do you package news in an interesting, accessible way without the overblown production values of the local US networks