Barklund.org » January 2010 Ideas

NYT Article Trend Charts – January 2010 Ideas

Barklund — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:00:47 +0000

The twenty-nineth idea for my 365 social ideas is a classic mashup: CatScanner, a charting application and the New York Times Article Search. The charting application could very likely be the previously mentioned Infographic Charting Service for better results (it could actually be built into this service) or it could be build stand-alone using any classic charting API like Google Charts.

Creating cool charts displaying the frequency of articles about Obama vs. McCain or comparing the articles about Obama in his first year vs. previous presidents NYT coverage in their first year are common and quite easy to do. But as previously explained about Twitter Trends, you cannot find what you don’t know you’re looking for. Let’s say we want to see how many articles are posted in NYT about Democrats vs. Republicans. Well, you could search for popular names from both parties, or you could hope that the writers have tagged their articles correctly.

But we can do better than that, as the Wikipedia category system will give us names of most politicians from both parties. Thus we can use these lists to create large queries about all Democrats vs. all Republicans and receive these numbers correctly.

Why?

This is a classic mashup displaying the power of combining commercial content (NYT articles) with crowd-sourced information (Wikipedia CatScanner) with generalized tools (charting API’s like Google Charts) with little effort for huge results. And this puts cretaing complicated charts back in the hands of everyone, not just the few who are good at both API’s and PhotoShop.

What’s next?

Do with this idea whatever you like – expand, implement, trash or forget. Just remember, that if you use it in anyway make sure to attribute me according to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, that all these 365 Social Ideas are published under.

Turn (Closed) Content Into an API – January 2010 Ideas

Barklund — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:00:56 +0000

The twenty-eighth idea for my 365 social ideas is about the open web and about “forcing” classic websites to export their data. Imagine sites with lots of useful information, that is frequently updated, but is hidden away behind forms, in PDF’s or in hard-to-scrape tables. Then imagine a website, where you could provide this address, and give it some guidance as to how to input data in forms and how to interpret the results. And then imagine, that this website would act as a proxy with this interaction described as a simple, queryable API and then behind the scenes would fetch data from the original website.

There are of course a lot of legal issues, and such a service should probably obey robots.txt. And there should be a very clear opt-out possibility for websites that have been targeted in user-contributed additions – maybe even moderation before the services are publicly available. It should not be seen as an attack vector, as a proxy method for illegal purposes or anything like that, but simply as a way of “helping” free information to be used freely.

Why?

A lot of data on the web is hidden in the so-called “deep web” behind forms or in inaccessible parts of websites. With a service like the above-mentioned, this would suddenly not only become visible and indexable, but even queryable.

What’s next?

Browser Snapshot Sharing – January 2010 Ideas

Barklund — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:00:54 +0000

The twenty-seventh idea for my 365 social ideas is an idea which has spun off my “investigation” of the SnapABug service: create a bookmarklet, that when clicked let’s you mark a section of the current webpage you are viewing (in it’s current state etc.) and then snapshots this and uploads the image to your image sharing service of choice – popular choices being flickr or more shoot-from-the-hip style services like tinypic.

Why?

Sharing snapshots of what you see currently is difficult. It is a lot easier on a Mac than on Windows, though Windows 7 has made it easier, but sharing it on the web still requires that you go to some website, browse for the image locally and upload in order to obtain a shareable url. If you had a simple bookmarklet as explained above, this process would be much easier.

What’s next?

Infographic Charting Service – January 2010 Ideas

Barklund — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:00:28 +0000

The twenty-sixth idea for my 365 social ideas is a new brand of charting service: A service designed for infographics, but with sharing, collaboration and synergy as an added side-effect.

The idea is to create a site enabling users to create infographics of the simplest kind initially, but then expand this to even more complex ones. For starters, it could allow users to create tables of data defining row and column labels and then selecting icons, colors and values for cells and having this displayed as larger and smaller icons according to the values – like this chart of the “deadliest drugs”. And allowing people to color-code maps of countries, cities or states according to some data would be quite simple to do as well – like this map of the origins and relationships of European languages.

But more important than simply creating cool visualizations, each infographic has an input page. This page can only be edited by the original creator of the infographic, but it includes direct links to sources of information used. The site should use a simple url structure (inspired by bit.ly), where the short-code would give the actual image, but with a + added (like http://bit.ly/365ideas+) it would be a link to the page describing all this background data.

And now comes the collaborative part: While only the creator can edit the data for the published infographic, anyone can copy the data to branch it as their own new infographic. These relationships will then also be displayed on the about page, as in “this is a spin-off of X and has Y spin-offs of its own”. Somewhat like the very nice ActionScript-programming website wonderfl. Here you can e.g. see that this creation of 250,000 particles is a spin-off from another simulation and has itself spun off into new simulations.

In time, this could be extended heavily and should of course have a public API for creating infographics easily and freely. New types of infographics could be added along with more complex editors allowing you to play around with the data as you see fit. It should be free to do and should not require complex knowledge of Illustrator or Photoshop.

This idea about letting others built on your own ideas could actually be implemented by many sites. The new Firefox 3.6 has “personas”, which is a very light theme engine – that most importantly does not require restart! But why didn’t the developers add a very fast and quick branching mechanism? If you found a cool persona, but didn’t like the color of the top-bar – just branch it, change the top-bar color and publish as a new persona (with credit where credit is due of course linking back to the original).

Why?

Simply: Infographics to the people! I’m not suggesting, that the creators of the coolest infographics aren’t brilliant. But they’re in the business because they both know how to find the data, how to present it and how to use the programs needed to create them. Let’s take the software knowledge part out of the equation and allow anyone with ideas and info to visualize it. And let’s do it openly and collaborate, not just publish a PNG and kill innovation.

What’s next?

Facebook Notes and Images for Competition Results – January 2010 Ideas

Barklund — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:00:43 +0000

The twenty-fifth idea for my 365 social ideas is a small simple idea: use Facebook notes or images combined with tags to display results of games. For instance, imagine a chess game, post the result of the game as a note on the game’s page with the final board, all moves made during the game and both players tagged. Or simply post the final board as an image and tag both players as well.

It is a very simple idea, but the idea is to use profile tagging in a new way to indicate relationships to the displayed information in a way, that the users actually feel related to this. The great thing about using tagging is, that it can be done without the user has to accept it and it will be auto-posted to his friends’ news feeds. But given that it can be done without asking the user, it should only be done if it is actually relevant for the user and not done just to get a viral effect and annoy users.

Why?

It is a new way to use the Facebook platform for viral effects. It’s quite simple and does not require a lot of programming as it uses simple, existing features.

What’s next?

Private Comment Sharing – January 2010 Ideas

Barklund — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 08:00:43 +0000

The twenty-fourth idea for my 365 social ideas is an idea for websites dealing in larger commodities like furniture, cars or even houses: Add private comments to the pages, that can be easily shared with friends and family, as this type of purchase is not something you do instantly, but spend time deciding.

When you consider buying a car, you don’t make the decision instantly. You look at it on the web several times, you discuss it with friends and family etc. But imagine that the dealer website added a private comments box, that would initially be empty, but as soon as you started adding comments, you could share this version of the page, with your comments, to everyone else. A bit like the wish list concept from Amazon, but giving others the opportunity to weigh in on your decision if you gave them the link. Then all comments about whether or not to buy this car, pros and cons, other possibilities etc. would be in one place, and not spread around in emails discussing this potential requisition.

This could easily be used by e.g. Amazon, ebay or similar companies. It should just be clearly visible, that this is private comments, that neither the dealer nor the seller will ever see. It is only for your own benefit to keep the discussion in one place between you and friends and family.

Why?

If you control the discussion, it is more likely that the user returns to your site, to keep the discussion going. It is a facilitator of making educated requisitions, but it ensures that this discussion takes place on your website.

What’s next?

Google Docs Application – January 2010 Ideas

Barklund — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 08:00:10 +0000

The twenty-third idea for my 365 social ideas is a very simple one: Wrap a Safari browser in a Mac OS X application that opens on Google Docs as the first (and only) website you can see.

I for one bashed Waveboard, when it came out, because it was simply Apple Safari wrapped in a Mac OS X application. But, recently I tried it again, as it had added Growl support, which means I was easily alerted to when new info was available in any of my waves – this made it feel much more like a mail application, because it was its own program on my MacBook, that I could switch program to and be notified about even though using billions of tabs in my “regular” browsing experience.

So, my suggestion is simply to anyone out there (I reckon it might actually be infinitely simple): do this with Google Docs and if possible, add similar Growl integration as has been done with the Waveboard application, then Google Docs would actually start to seem like a “real” program in itself.

Why?

Because I need it. I might be alone, but I doubt it. And I am pretty sure this is very simple, but it would be really useful.

What’s next?

Social Traffic Analyzer – January 2010 Ideas

Barklund — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:00:12 +0000

The twenty-second idea for my 365 social ideas is not really a clear-cut idea – yet. But I feel a need for a new website traffic analyzing service. Google Analytics is definitely the mostly used and best free service. But they have many shortcomings, and I definitely would like to see a new player enter this playing field. And while where add it, there are some new trends and actions, that current has a huge influence on current traffic trends, that you cannot track fully: social media traffic.

I do not know how to integrate all these things, but a good traffic analyzer should know not only who links to you but also who is sharing links to your services through which channels. It should report which channels generate the most traffic, but also who pushes the links to these channels etc. If someone e.g. tweets/diggs/reddits about your service/website a lot, it should be reflected.

About the short-comings of Google Analytics, my main concern is, that when experimenting with how you can track new things, there is a 1-4 hour delay on page tracks and up to 3 days delay on custom variables tracking (in my experience). A good provider really ought to have a development option available, that only allow limited traffic but provide almost-instant analysis of this data.

Why?

This is one of the simplest of Google’s services, and thus we really need a contender. With the availability of cheap clouds, it should be quite easy to set up, though it would require some funding to provide it to people for free. Google Analytics does not innovate that much – not in the social media tracking area at least. They are more interested in developing new things in the “how can I make people buy more crap from me” category for web shop owners.

What’s next?

Game of Life – January 2010 Ideas

Barklund — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:00:09 +0000

The twenty-first idea for my 365 social ideas is another gaming idea: create a set of classic flash-based games along the lines of break-out, tetris etc, but integrate a simple storyline with good and bad characters, places and items involved and make these configurable. You could through this create a game of your own life by inserting persons from your surroundings, places where you meet, stuff that you work with etc. and you could send this game to your friends and family and they could then play out the big game of your life.

This is still fairly simple, but then imagine automatic integration with social networks, so you simply connect via Facebook, Twitter or any other interesting friendship services and you can pick between your friends, recent updates etc. and it would automatically try to create this game.

Or what about having it automatically parse articles etc. for creating games about anything. Say this blogpost – it would automatically recognize names of persons, places and interactable items and then generate the game. It could be used for all sorts of fun things and the great thing would be, that anything could happen. You could re-enact Obama’s presidential campaign victory, the Algerian War or Romeo and Juliet – simply by using the right characters, places and items combined with the right storyline.

Why?

Because it is fun. And putting news and other items in a new perspective adds to the fun of information sharing. Plus, having fun with your friends and family the same way would be an added benefit.

What’s next?

Interest Groups on Foursquare – January 2010 Ideas

Barklund — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:00:59 +0000

The twentieth idea for my 365 social ideas is to combine the ideas of interest group websites like Meetup.com with location-aware services like Foursquare or Gowalla: Allow people with the same interests as you to see where you are available for talking about this interest. For instance, it is far more useful to know, that one of your friends, acquaintances or a stranger is at some place nearby and willing to talk about needle point with you, than just knowing where one of your friends is without actually having anything to use that information for.

Foursquare and related services all have the problem, that simply telling where you are does not necessarily mean, that anyone reading where you are, are welcome to join you. Some days ago, I read about someone checking at a local restaurant, two friends dropped by only to awkwardly leave again shortly after, as there weren’t room for them. By introducing interest groups and by selecting actively, that the fact that you are at a certain location can be revealed to this interest group, you explicitly specify “and you are welcome to join me for discussion/networking/drinks/fun”.

Why?

Revealing your location in a more or less specific position is one thing, but adding the information “and I’m revealing this to you because..” is almost as important. Some simply do it for bragging purposes, some for being known as the party girl and so on – and some do it for networking/socializing purposes, and these users would benefit from being able to attract like-minded people for heated discussions and sharing secrets about dog breeding, spelunking equipment or JavaScript libraries.