I m in berlin at the moment and just remembered a conversation i had with Markus Schneider whom i met here last time i visited the city. Markus is music journalist for the Berliner Zeitung. He told me how hard it was during the 80ties and 90ties to get qualified information about new music. But since 2000 he is recognizing a major increase of general music-knowledge. “Even talking to youngsters about music today, reveals an amazing knowledge about non mainstream genres.”

As cofounder of last.fm this is music to my ears. Why?

Technorati Tags: last.fm, long tail, olpc

One of our goals was to introduce new music to people and supply tools which help to discover one’s real music taste besides the industries marketing instruments. When we founded last.fm it was crystal clear that the music industry is most profitable in selling main stream artists and titles. Therefor the music marketing departments were not very interested in spreading the word about niche musical genres besides the mainstream genres. And because mass media (radio, tv) was the dominant culture- distributor and the music marketing guys were real friends with the mass media maker we were living in a cultural hegemony. So when founding last.fm the goal which was buried deep down in loads of other goals, was not just to break the dominance of mass media, but also to break the dominance of the music industry and get people out of the cultural hegemony. (hence the name, last.fm).

So listening to this music journalist told me that the whole thing actually works. You don’t need to read the long tail in order to see real indications that the internet and especially recommendation and personalization technologies are pushing the wisdom of our species. The web became the number 1 resource of information and recommendation and personalization tools bring the right information to the right minds. If you look at this closer the web looks more and more like a teacher. To me, a good teacher as well as the current status of the web features the following characteristics :

• Information resource….. A shear endless resource of information about almost everything on this planet
• Pedagogic methodology…. Don’t confuse pupils, give it to them when they need it.
• Communicate… Give pupils tools to rise their voice and exchange their thoughts which will increase the learning effect

Instead of falling into an academically discussion about e-learning (..yawn) i want to tell you something about another interesting person i met about two weeks ago - Nicolas Negroponte. Nicolas is currently running most of MIT and doing another thousand things, one of it is the One Laptop Per Child project, also known as the 100$ laptop. The idea behind the OLPC project in short, is to support kids in developing countries (and others..) with laptops. These laptops are really smart, because they have things like a handle bar to manually charge the batteries and they have wifi capabilities able to create open mashed networks. I asked about the content on these laptops. One strategy about content is a built in wiki which is shared through the wifi network. So of course this is clever, but learning from what we know and checking the list from above, i think one critical part is missing: Pedagogic methodology - Don’t confuse pupils, give it to them when they need it -. Because most of the 100$ laptop is programmed in python and Lovely Systems is doing stuff in python, i offered Nicolas our help. I guess the bit where i would start working at, is the - Don’t confuse… give it when it is needed. I m quite curios if we get something done.