So now that I have a target for the project, a ‘dream’ if you will, that I need to fulfill which is : a system where I can press one button and see a list of all the “cool things” going on in my local area.

I now need to think up a way to actually realize this. The first issue will be “how do I get the list of cool stuff into the system?” . That is definitely going to be the key to how this system will work, my options are : trawling existing sites to grab contents, asking users to input contents or writing my own contents.

The first idea, creating some sort of spider to find the information for me would be pretty straight forward technically speaking, but has a few drawbacks. Firstly I need the location information for the “cool stuff”, ie: I will need the longitude and latitude co-ordinates for each item I collect. I don’t think it would be possible to get this from a web page ( unless I do some reverse geocoding GPS lookup on the address details ). Secondly, I have no way of knowing if the “stuff” the crawler finds is really “cool stuff” or just “mediocre stuff”, as I have already stated I only want “cool stuff” on this site.

That reminds me, I have decided that this service is definitely going to be provided as a “site” for now. I have played with Brew and more recently with Android and that has given me some insight into what would be required to release this as an appli. It will be far simpler and will reach a much larger audience if I go with a regular web based system built with PHP or J2EE.

Back to the mechanics of finding the “cool stuff”. The second idea, using user generated content, even if it is a web2.0 cliché seems to be the best way to achieve what I want to do. I can get people ( hopefully ) to register the places they visit with the system and other people to rate them. This way I can find the stuff that is going on and also determine if its “cool” or not.

The third idea – providing the content myself will probably be required in the early stages regardless as I doubt I will be able to build a user base very quickly. However, I do not want to just create another “blog” with a GPS interface as I have enough difficulty keeping this one up-to-date.

So there we have it, my new project is going to be a “user recommendation system for location-based information”. Perfect!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 4:30 pm and is filed under CellSuite, Handsets, Services, Innovation, Technology, Future, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.