Three Ideas For Web 2.0 By One Guy

Ideas that will change the world--or not.

  1. What is Love?

    I wish the net had a site that could determine what love, or other emotions, are represented in web content. This would allow to search the web emotionally, and not just semantically. The idea would be that the site's backend would crawl through major web services, like del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Amazon.com, etc. and use existing tags and other keyword fields to identify which other keywords and data appear in entries related to "love" or other emotions. Then it would make predictions based on new content, and flash these up to web users. In HotOrNot style, users could say whether the found items represent love or not. The search would become more refined over time.

  2. Hottie Bot

    I wish the net had a site that found attractive people. This would allow us to look at attractive people, arguably the most popular use of the Internet. Using the HotOrNot API (or page scraping), start pulling in images of people and correlating those images to their HotOrNot rating. Then do facial recognition to pull out the face images and store that in a database. Then re-train the facial recog algorithm to recognize faces within a certain scoring bracket (e.g. 0 - 5 vs. 5 - 10). Then turn the backend loose on incoming RSS feeds from sites like Flickr and YouTube and pull up the most attractive people that appear in images associated with those contents. Make feeds of the attractive people who are appearing on the internet.

  3. RengaWrangler

    I wish the net had a site that helped poets write renga, a Japanese poetic form. This would allow the writing of collaborative poetry in unique ways. Renga are linked poems of two and three lines per submitted stanza. RengaWrangler would aid people in creating the long-chained poems, allowing them to fork and recombine in interesting ways. Later readers could navigate a single linked poem in several different forking/threading styles. Interesting data viz possibilities here.

Copyright Mike Edwards 2006-2009. All content available under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, unless otherwise noted.