Do crashing computers and busted Blackberries completely freak you out? Does a cryptic error message on your screen leave you feeling defeated or discouraged? According to a new study from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, your age might have something to do with your attitudes and emotions surrounding technology.

Researcher John B. Horrigan points out: electricity was once new too. But now we flip on light switches without a second thought. And when the telephone was taking off in the early 1900's, people were given specific instructions on how to make a phone call - something we now do every day. Over the passage of time, each new generation of users becomes more savvy and more adept at using the new technology until it no longer exists as some odd new-fangled invention, but simply part of the world as we know it.

The same holds true for our computers, our internet connections, our gadgets and our cell phones. When these things fail, it's the younger users that are generally much more optimistic about the situation. Although young adults age 18-29 years old are no more likely to be able fix devices on their own, they were significantly more likely to be confident that they were on the right path to fixing it, and they were significantly less likely than older adults to feel discouraged or confused about fixing devices, says the study.

In fact, 85% of 18-29 year olds reported being confident about solving their device problem, while only about a third of them said they were discouraged or confused. Meanwhile, over half (52%) of adults age 30 and older reported being discouraged, 44% said they were confused, and about two out of three (67%) said they were confident. Adults age 30-49 were somewhat less likely than older adults to be confused, as just 39% said they were.

There was some variation among gender lines, too, with men being more likely than women to be confident about problem solving (76% vs. 68%), but they were just as confused, discouraged or impatient during the course of trying to solve the problem.

What this means is that, given time, our idea of a "mainstream user" will have to change. No longer will they be the slightly fearful, easily frustrated, computer novices. Instead, they will be much more at ease with technology. They may never be as tech-obsessed as we are, but they will have no problem adopting a new technology if it delivers value.

How It Works

Each tag  in Moody creates a corresponding playlist in iTunes, so you don't need to use the Moody app to play your color-coded songs, although you can. You can name these tags anything you want, like "Dance" or "Mellow" or "Rockin'," depending how how you decided to categorize your music. Tunes can be labeled while you're listening to music, so you don't have to sit at your computer for hours tagging - you can just do it little-by-little, over time.

However, for some people, their music collections are far too large to tag items one by one, so there is an option to download tags (moods) for their tunes from the Moody database (for Mac users only).

Your tagged music can be ported over to your iPod as playlists, or, if you want to actually make the tags visible in your iPod, you can choose to put the tags in the composer ID3 field instead of the app's default of the comment field.

Color Coded Web Radio

I found Moody's color-coding is very much reminiscent of the Musicovery web radio service where you can discover new music based on how you feel. At Muiscovery, color-coded songs and a "mood matrix" help you narrow down your musical preferences while you begin exploring new tunes in a visually appealing way. You use the  "mood matrix" chart to click on what mood you are in: energetic, dark, positive, or calm or anywhere in between. You can even select or unselect the boxes next to the various musical genres like rock, rap, latin, soul, etc. so you will only be presented with songs that match your preferred styles. The songs appear in a visual display where they float around the screen connected to each other based on their tempo and their positive or negative lyrics. The color-coding lets you easily see which songs are from which genre.

 This month, the team behind the Moody app, quietly launched an experimental online player of their own, which is more like what Musicovery offers, except a much simpler version.

The player itself looks just like the Moody app. It works by querying the Moody database to determine mood and then searches for the tracks using Seeqpod. Since the tracks are from all over the internet, the quality can vary from song to song. This web player is still very much in alpha, but fans of the uncomplicated Moody app will love it.

Oh, and in case you're curious, the team at Moody has figured out the color of love - you would think it's red,  but apparently it's more of a yellow/greenish color. Who knew?

This startup is doing something far more interesting than that. While Google Maps and related consumer products have whetted the public's appetite for visualization of specific places on a map, earthmine is making those places machine readable.

The company uses a proprietary array of still-images cameras to take photos in stereo at regular spacial intervals while driving through city streets. The resulting 3D images can be measured with an accuracy that corresponds to measurements of the physical objects and distances they represent.

The company says it covered San Francisco in just three weeks. Each day's data is processed automatically and is available before the next day begins.

The initially self-funded company recently took an investment from CalTech and secured an exclusive liscence to use 3D image processing technology developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Generating dense, accurate 3D data from wide-angle images is a serious technology challenge but one that the JPL worked on to process data returned by the Mars Rover.

What it means

Just as we here at ReadWriteWeb are excited about the potential offered by a machine-readable, or semantic, web - so too are the possibilities countless when thinking about a data rich, accurate and machine-readable 3D representation of the urban environment. earthmine offers a usable looking web interface but that's just the friendly wrapper around a dataset of far greater consequence.

From urban planning to mobile services to security applications, this kind of data and interface has a lot of potential. If the value of mapping and of GIS are clear, the value of a geospatial 3D dataset about urban environments should be clear as well. Combine all three and you'll be able to assemble some very interesting resources on almost any topic.

It is important to me to say that I don't care for the way the company talks about the technology, as "reality mining" and "indexing reality." To call that tasteless would be an understatement. I'm concerned that such reductionism could have substantial adverse political consequences. Maybe I'm just old fashioned to believe that there's far more that's important in "reality" than the things that can be digitized - and that much of it ought not be mined. I should probably stop, though, before a corporate exit puts me in thumbscrews listening to a well-fed Dr. Evil laugh. This technology itself could be put to use for good or ill, I'm sure.

Either way, this is fascinating stuff and worth some thought no matter how you relate to it. In addition to the very well produced company-produced video below this interview with the young earthmine CEO and this one of his time on stage at the DEMO Fall conference is worth a watch.