JayQClone

3 Ideas For Web 2.0

Three Ideas for Interactive Web Sites

1)    Interactive Social Networking and Collaborative website for Musicians 

        In order to make the most of this idea the site must be comprehensive.  There are a number of different facets to the website that must work in tandem for it to be effective and original.  There are three main sections of the site:  The social networking branch, the collaboration / recording board branch, and the marketing branch.

            A)  The Social Networking Branch:  The user sets up a profile of his musical skills and interests.  He lists what bands he is influenced by, the different genres he is most interested in, and the type of music he creates, all in priority order.  The user can then list what instruments he plays, what instruments he is looking for for collaboration, experience level, and where he is located.  This section will also have a forum where people can discuss musical projects, collaborations, and interests.  This part of the site is used to find other users with similar musical interests and ideas, and the searchable profiles make it easy to find people to collaborate with whether in person or strictly through the site.

            B)  The Collaboration / Recording Board:  The user can post tracks to the board embedded with tags describing BPM, time signature, genre, sub-genre, instrumentation, influences, and whatever else might help other users find what they're looking for.  The track is posted and is linked to the owner's username.  Every piece of music on the recording board is considered to be the property of the musician that wrote it.  If someone listens to the track and wants to use it by adding something to it or embedding it into an existing piece of music, that person requests permission to use it, and if the author agrees he can then unlock the track for that person to use.  The new iteration of the track can then either be posted again if the multiple authors still feel that it can be added to, or they can finalize the track and send it to the marketing section / store.

            C)  Marketing Section / Store:  Each user will have some sort of monthly fee to use the site which is added to a community pot ($10?).  The site's users pay a monthly fee but also have the opportunity to make money depending on how "in demand" his contributions are.  Each time someone requests to unlock a user's track the author of the piece receives a small fee from the community pot ($0.05?).  When a track is finalized it becomes permanently locked and cannot be reused within the context of the recording board.  It is then sent to the store where it can be bought by listeners.  When a track is purchased from the store the profits are split among the contributors.  This way users have an incentive to remain as active as possible on the site in terms of output and quality.  In addition to the monthly fee, the site will include targeted advertising based on users' musical interests as described in their profiles.

2)    Retail Product Locator

        I find there is a serious inadequacy with the current product locators and yellow page services on the web right now.  My product locator of choice right now is Froogle, but the problem is that it is mostly online merchants and physical retailers are left out because they don't have online databases of their stock.  I would like to see a searchable database of all local retailers online so that a customer can find a given product in his area without searching store to store.  Presumably, most retailers now have each of their products in a database within their store to keep track of items via RFID tags.  Some stores might not be willing to make their prices public, but a list of their available products should be public knowledge, and this way customers can find them without physically searching.  If I'm looking for a specific pair of shoes in a specific size, I should be able to type in the information and find a list of all stores in my area that carry what I'm looking for.  It would be rather inexpensive and efficient to participate in such a site in light of the new customers that store would be able to reach by posting inventory.

3)    Smart News Aggregator / Custom Newspaper

        Using a list of keywords and areas of interests a user can create a customizable newspaper.  This would be similar to google's desktop but would be far more user definable.  Let's say I wanted to create a newspaper that offered stories on the Iraq War, Radiohead, Nikola Tesla, Haruki Murakami, New York area concerts, new film reviews, blog posts by Alec Baldwin, and DIY articles from Make magazine.  Some editions would be lengthier than others depending on how many stories were retrievable that day, and of course, this would be limited to free publications with sites like New York Times Select being excluded.  A user's interests change and expand over time and will be reflected in output as the profile grows.

Trauma Bear Documentation

We Are The Web: Criticism and Review

   

    Let me start by noting that I didn't find much in this article to disagree with.  I often think about what an amazing invention the internet is, as if it were the culmination of civilization's 5000 year journey in information gathering, and at the same time it's only the very beginning of a strange and exciting new era in human evolution.  Kevin Kelly's enthusiasm is not lost on me.  Even though open source software, social networking, and interactive web sites are all a developing branch of this fairly new medium, the invention that has the most significance for me is without a doubt Wikipedia.  When Kelly talks about the internet as a vast compendium of human knowledge, I immediately think of the ever evolving encyclopedia.  For me, this is the essence of what the internet is all about.  Google searches can give you leads into finding information on just about any topic, but more often than not you will have to troll through a number of amateurish web sites as well as sites that are completely of the mark before finding the information you're looking for.  As of 2007, English Wikipedia had over 1.6 million articles, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which held the record for nearly 600 years.  Clearly something cataclysmic has taken place when a 600 year old publication has been displaced as the largest single source of reference material on the planet. 
    People often cite the fact that Wikipedia is a user-generated source of information and therefore it can't be trusted.  This to me sounds like the sort of talk that might have been heard at the time of the Magna Carta.  I ask why a narrow committee of authors that publish the Encyclopedia Britannica should have the final say on what truth is.  The internet has broken the stranglehold on information that a select info-monarchy has held for a long time.  Wikipedia is an information democracy.  If there is debate over an entry's veracity, the reader is informed of this controversy at the entry's outset in big bold letters.  If you're engaged in an in-depth research project it's probably best to go the library and seek out primary sources.  However, there are innumerable times in a given week where I am looking for essential information.  I don't need primary sources every time I want to find out the full meaning of an acronym I've come across in a magazine or the definition of the word Meme.  I can go straight to Wikipedia and be confident that I'm not getting some controversial and biased definition. 
    Thanks to blogs, message boards, and comments sections, the internet has become a vast sewing circle where people can discuss their opinions on any issue.  We see this reflected in the rapidly changing state of politics today.  The days when a candidate could refute something he or she has said in the past are over.  The instant a candidate claims that their past position is in perfect harmony with their current position a barrage of blogs posting YouTube videos of a 1989 stump speech for state senate reveals them to be the dirty liars that they are.  The funny thing is that many of them haven't caught on to the fact that the internet is now the ultimate harbinger of truth, and they continue to step into these traps merely because they are running on instinct.  The democratic nature of the internet means that truth is always out there, and with 600 billion blogs generating information everyday, the truth is likely to spill out somewhere. 
    Of course with such a large number of eyes and hands working together it is inevitable that no matter what the platform, someone is going to try to make money.  Wikimedia is a non-profit organization that relies heavily on private donations.  Other costly sites are not so lucky.  Kelly talks about the surprising fact that established media conglomerates like ABC are now aging dinosaurs and that new and exciting media companies like Yahoo! and Google are the champions of the day.  But this is merely evolution.  In a few years Yahoo! and Google will be the media dinosaurs looking to solidify their place in the market.  How do we know that they won't eventually turn to censorship and proprietary backends?  My feeling is that this will happen eventually unless these companies are able to stay on the forefront of innovation.  You tend to get less squeamish about keeping things open source when you're making money hand over fist.
     But one of the reasons I'm not too worried about the internet becoming a closed-source pay-as-you-go toll booth plaza is its proven track record for adaptation, especially in the case of file sharing.  There was a big fight a few years back when Napster seemed to be stealing money out of the pockets of music industry fat cats, so they decided to throw lawyers at the problem instead of adjusting their business model.  With hindsight we now see what a fatal mistake that was.  The internet is so malleable that no number of lawyers are going to be able to stop a planet full of people who desire to share content.  Napster as a P2P platform died and became a pay service.  No one uses it.  In its place, BitTorrent and innumerable other systems have filled the gap, and songs are traded in the same volume they were in Napster's heyday.  It might take some getting used to, but the internet seems like it will always bend to the will of the mob and not the power of the few. 

Knight Rider Switch

The old Knight Rider setup with a switch.  I realized that we had to do something with the LED's so I didn't want people getting mad at my piezo and decided to offer this little setup.  There's no snazzy sound like with the piezo so I kept my speakers on.  Enjoy.

IT Conversation Podcasts 2

The second podcast I listened to was an interview with David Lemberg here.  He has his own radio program called Science and Society, so what we're listening to here is basically a radio interview about a scientist that does radio interviews.  Not as interesting as the Wozcast.  I'm personally very interested in particale physics and the work that is going on in Switzerland wth the Large Hadron Collider at CERN which is why I decided to listen to this particular podcast.  All the excess material about which interviews he likes to do, and who are the most interesting subjects seem like wasted questions...the interesting part is the science of science, not the science of the interview.  The LHC at CERN (atom smasher) is a project decades in the making, and the goal is to create a microcosmic reproduction of the bib bang so that theoretical physicists working in the field of string theory can actually test their hypotheses.  This is a huge moment in the history of science because it will get us that much closer to understanding  the origins of the universe and will allow scientists to finally look for physical evidence and proof of largely abstract theories like string theory.

IT Conversation Podcasts

I listened to the Wozcast here.  This one was great for a number of reasons.  First of all it was an uninterrupted manic storytelling session whch is much more captivating than a radio-style interview where the interviewee is measured in his/her responses and employs the overly pretentious radio voice.  Woz takes us through the early days of his experience with electronics and his enthusiasm is contagious.  He talks about his lack of social skills and how this translated into his immersion into electronics and pranks.  I really admire his dedication to a field at such a young age (6th grade).  I often think that my childhood moved in the wrong direction because my heroes were anti-heroes that promoted apathy and ignorance.  For Woz, he had already gained the fundamental skills, limitless curiosity, and motivation necessary to make the breakthroughs that made him famous.