BB: Final Project Idea...

[katster]

(BB meaning Best Brains, a notation from alt.callahans.)

Anyway, it comes time for the scariest semester in my master's program. (*bum* *bum* *baaaaaah*)

Final Project Semester.

I'd love to make something that everybody would use, sorta like how Brad ended up with livejournal in general, or something remarkably simple like Friendster, but...I can't think of any cool ideas to work with. So if anybody can come up with anything that would be cool and worth the effort, and would work for this, could you please throw them out?

(Oh yeah, and my classwork. I've taken the standard SIMS core (covered here, except my 208 was one full class), a class on XML, a class on multimedia information systems (which I hated), a class on networking, a class on information policy, and a class on new product development. This semester, I don't know what else I'm taking, except that one of them will probably be an information strategy course, and I'm leaning towards either a database class or a user interface class this semester.

Help is appreciated.

[Oh yeah, and new icon. This is for academic related stuff (it's UCB's seal)]

Comments

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

Okay, here's something on my todo list, but you can have it for free: a 'community' webapp focused on keeping a smallish group of friends (I'm thinking specifically about the people who were with me in college) in touch. I envisage a blog per person, a community blog (possibly with a mailing list gateway), a wiki, a password-protected area with contact information, and a content-management type thingy where they can trivially maintain a minimalist 'home page' with more detailed information. Not sure if it's big or complicated enough to count as a project, but you can keep adding stuff to it :) A world map with pins, for instance. A 'messageboard' where people can stick and remove notices would be nice too - it could act as the 'home page'. A filesharing area would also be handy. You get the idea.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Okay, this isn't exactly my idea, so don't blame me if it's dumb. Have you ever read Willam Gibbson's "Virtual Light" ?

He had a gizmo in it that I liked, it was a pair of sunglasses that also acted as the vR interface for a database. Now, I'm not suggesting the sunglasses, that ain't possible, but the database.

Basically it worked like this, you looked at someplace, the program retreived all the information it could about that place, be it building or what.

I was thinking, given that mobile phones can place your location to few metres, [or a GPS system for that matter] what if you had a handhelp or laptop that ran an app that did a web-crawl for info on that location ? So, you pointed it at a building, and it would find out everything it could about that building.

That's just the raw idea, you could throw things in like an interface that learns what sort of info you want, and ranks the retrived items, etc.

[rbos.livejournal.com]

Build a p2p implementation of DNS using existing domain servers to replace the root name servers; existing name servers should be able to replace their root zone with a seed file or equivalent.

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

Hi, came in from Shadesong's journal.

I don't really know the parameters of your project, but here's an idea...

How about a job/experience database? For instance, I've often seen people in cool jobs and wondered "Wow! How do you get a job like that?" or, on the other side of it, found myself looking for work and wondering what sort of job I can get with the skills I have. Simple word searches at job banks don't really help much.

How about site where folks can list things like that or build up information on how-to-get-into-career X.

Call it degrees of freedom.

[slipjig.livejournal.com]

Oooo! I'm very much liking this. It reminds me of a Web page that I can't find any more which presented a block-by-block hypertext tour of a particular nighborhood in Manhattan: you could scroll (rudimentally) in any of the four directions, and click individual buildings to get a description of what's there, what used to be there, and some idea of the history of it as applicable. Now imagine doing that on an enormous scale, and opening it up to allow for photos, outside links, etc.

What could make this potentially work as an LJ-like phenomenon is that the data could only be gathered through dedicated volunteerism, much in the same way that the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) has grown through reader contirbutions. You'd need people to process the data received, of course, and some way to report abuses and changes and remove deliberately false information, but I could very easily see this working.

Taking the entire U.S. (or the entire world, for that matter) would perhaps be too big a bite to start out with, so it may be prudent to being with only a few well selected cities (say, NYC, Chicago, LA, SF, maybe three or four others), and then add others at it starts to catch on. Once critical mass has been reached, people could volunteer to start work on whatever town they like, using basic MapQuest data as a starting point, possibly tying it in with reverse telephone directory services as a starting point.

Okay, yes, I'm pipe-dreaming horribly, but I know that if such a project existed, I'd be all over it like bad credit. Just a thought.