[Sigia-l] Folksonomy on IT Conversations

[Lisa deBettencourt]

On Aug 22, 2005, at 1:24 PM, Listera wrote:
>>press the "Buy Now" button on your FM radio?
>
>That day has been here a while. For instance:
>
><http://www.relatable.com/>
>
>There are multiple companies working on this, approaching it from various
>directions: embedded in the radio or via mobile devices like PDAs, USB
>keychain-like devices and cellphones. They generally rely on a large
>database of acoustic fingerprints against which a small sample is compared.
>Lookup in a digital music store for download is a trivial matter once the
>song is identified.

Ahhh... but alas, the day that I described is *not* here. The day when all 
the technology is seamless, integrated and embedded in the vehicle... for 
regular people. That's the day when it comes equipped in cars on the lot. 
Yes, there are companies, universities, etc. working on lots of machine 
listening systems and Gracenote, AMG, etc. are adding content to their 
databases daily, and wireless to the car is being developed. But, all of it 
integrated together with a nice easy payment and authorization scheme? And 
approved by the big DRM lawyers? Hardly! ;-)

>I assume RDS could be used for song id as well?  Though us slow-pokes in 
>the U.S. are yet to really get on the bandwagon with using the RT 
>functionality.

RDS in Europe is such a nice thing... and that the radio stations mostly 
play by the rules set up by the guideline is even nicer. Song info, station 
genre and station call letters are displayed regularly. Here in the US, we 
use RBDS (Radio Broadcast Data Service) that is similar but not quite 
identical to RDS.

PS (Program Service), PTY (Program Type), and RT (Radio Text) are the 3 
primary tags that are used in both schemes, but because the US automakers 
haven't completely signed up to support the full use and not all radios can 
display the info, not all radio stations broadcast the data (chicken, meet 
egg.) The radio stations that do support the data are then known to hack the 
8 character PS string (that's supposed to have station call letters) with 
all kinds of scrolling, flashing text of song info, traffic, commercials, 
etc. That means that info can't be relied on to use for song look-up, 
whereas RT in Europe is the 64 character string that usually carries that 
information.

~Lisa