Brainstorming Additional Ideas

Quick secondary post: while I've been writing I have also been thinking about additional things I could make. Most are just starts of ideas, or issues that I think would be interesting to explore. As always the names are mostly internal and the first thing that popped into my head:

  • Search Roulette: We operate under the assumption that search engines have no agenda and are impartial in returning content to us, but this is not the case. We prioritize content based on Google's ranking system without understanding how it works or it's agenda. Google prioritizes advertised results at almost every available opportunity and uses abstract ranking algorithms which are actively exploited. How do we know that the 1st result on Google will really be more informative to us than the 100th? What are we missing by operating under Google's assumption of reality?Jia Zhang's (DT '09) thesis Googlist is a great precedent for the types of questions I've been asking myself with this. The initial direction I thought of focused on the idea of randomizing or shuffling Google's search results for a given query. Without having Google's ranking system to rely on, would we spend more time analyzing results ourselves and making our own judgements about what is useful for us? Unfortunately Google's Search API is written in AJAX. My only familiarity with AJAX is the cleaner, not the programming language, so it's taking me some time to figure things out.
  • Sleepy: I have a few prototypes that explore the availability of data but this one has it's own agenda born out of my own experiences. Having instant and any-time access to data is seen as positive, but what are the side effects of this availability? It's like dining at a 24/7 all-you-can-eat buffet: if no one tells us to take a break, will we stop on our own? I was thinking about this idea of down time, and how we only see it implemented on the web in an abstract form - when adminstrators pull sites temporarily for "site maintenance" purposes. I thought it would be interesting to create a website that goes to sleep and wakes up like people do. It was inspired by my amusement over Gmail's 8-bit theme, which alternates between a "day" and "night" version of it's backdrop depending on the time of day. Returning to my eating/gluttony metaphor, it would be a way to prevent "midnight snacking" and help make people aware of their usage patterns. I envisioned an animation of digital sheep hopping over a fence, with each sheep counting down to the time when the site would be "active" again.
  • Back to the Future: At the Transparent Text symposium I attended last semester, one of the speakers asked a great question in jest: "What was the great tweet of 2009?" I interpreted it as a commentary on how short our attention spans are and the virtual "shelf-life" of the content people are producing. It led me to consider an experiment based on several questions: how interesting or relevant is my Twitter feed from 6 months ago? If I followed this time-delayed feed on a daily basis over a week, let's say, would what I discussed then still be important to me now? I'm going to just go ahead and see if I can grab that data to see what my stream from 6 months ago looks like. It led me to consider a service that would subvert our emphasis on real-time: What would Twitter be like if we could write tweets now but they wouldn't appear on our feed until 6 months later? Would we still write about mundane events of our day, or would we take the time to write about more thoughtful and engaging content? I think this could be really interesting as a commentary on the effects of real-time communication on the content we are producing.

That's all for now, feedback would be appreciated, I know it's a lot to read but hopefully there's some interesting nuggets in there! Thanks.