Roadcasting?

I am so thrilled that Leander is back at the blog and want to publicly congratulate him on his new post as content editor at Wired News. I'm glad he's found time for blogging again, though, because I was really jonesing for a fix during his 10 week absence. If he didn't resurface soon I was going to make him an offer for his RSS feed collection ;)

But I digress. A few days ago he posted about Roadcasting, which is a concept that Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute is playing around with. The Roadcasting system is an "automotive broadcasting system that will allow drivers to broadcast their digital music collections to other autos within a 30-mile radius." It "promises to help drivers create playlists to broadcast, while guiding listeners to micro-stations that fit their tastes via a collaborative filtering mechanism." The project, he reports, was commissioned by a major auto manufacturer in anticipation of mobile ad hoc networks by 2010.

The first time I read this I thought "wicked cool!" But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that satellite radio providers like XM are already sort of doing this for cars, aren't they? Not this exact thing, obviously, but in a broad sense.

To learn more, check out roadcasting.org. It's really quite an amazing undertaking and I am intrigued, for sure. I'm just not sure I see a tremendous value in the final product (should there ever really be one).