Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some time with Clay Loges '68, who was on campus to meet with folks over in the Business Leadership Program and also interview one of our PG majors who is interested in interning at his web start-up, Yodio.
We blogged about Yodio last fall; the service allows you to combine your photos or images with audio, the nice bit being that you simply dial in from a phone to make those captions. There's a lot of possibilities here; making audio tours, or creating audio/video "postcards," the latter of which would be really great for travel abroad.
Clay and I also talked about his experiences in Russia in the 1990s, when he ran an FM radio station that introduced classic rock to a country that had been all but cut off from Western popular culture. He's got some fascinating stories of that tumultuous time, and how the success of his station eventually attracted the unwelcome attention of those in power (see: Russia, Failure of Democracy).
Finally, we talked about Global Positioning Systems, or GPS. What will the intersection of GPS, cell phones, portable media players and the web do for information collection? Clay gave me the perspective that GPS helps "ground" information, allowing us to do things like link photos or text to places. We think of the Web as being virtual, but in reality it often references very real locations that GPS can help tag, organize, sort, and inform.
Here's an example of this at work: http://www.waymarking.com/
My only regret is that we didn't have enough time to talk. Clay, like so many of our majors, is a great role model, someone who started with a PG degree, moved from politics to media to overseas and back and now is playing a role in changing how we create information and build online networks. Thanks, Clay, for taking the time to share your experiences with us.
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