Fall 2007

What are your first impressions of the project? Any thoughts or ideas are fair game here - we can then spin off things that need further discussion into their own threads.

My understanding of the project from what Mr. Scanlon described is that he is looking for a way to model, organize, relate, and distribute information. There are a few technologies/fields/ideas that came to mind - I will try to gather some links for these when I have more time:

• microformats
• tagging
• social networking
• RSS, Wikipedia, and Google which were already mentioned in class

There were also some aspects of the project that he seemed to stress. Specifically:

• multimedia (video/audio/text/etc...)
• a way to add value to information (based on the authority of companies, of peers, etc.)
• prescience (it tells me what I need to know before I know to ask for it)
• "think outside the box" (don't limit the project based on current technologies; ie, not necessarily a traditional search engine type application)

Those are some of the things that struck me.