Couple of Ideas

I have been musing over a couple of ideas for the past few weeks.

1) The first one had to do with alerts. Most of the WWW today is based on polling. I lookup a website and it tells me if it has something new for me. I wanted to create a website which would be an 'alerts network'. People can come and create alerts. Just like Google Alerts and probably weave networks of such alerts. Upon using Google alerts, I felt that alerts just throws too many things at you, whether or not you want. Thus we need something in between alerts and polling. A system which would capture your desired alerts and show just a summary of those to you upon your desire.

2) The second had to do with media micro-content. I usually work on three-four computers. Have my data all over the place. I was wondering if its possible to use this micro-content to provide a single interface to all my distributed data. For eg, I have some music on office PC, some music on my laptop, some on youtube, some on esnips.com and some on my mobile phone and the rest on an iPod. Suppose I create an XML based metadata which resides on a standard server. Essentially, it has to be accessible from any system. This XML would provide a virtual 'find-all-music-here" kind of interface. When I use some software to play a song, it would just look up where it is and play it.

Introduction

One of the first questions people ask me whenever I start something is a very simple one - "Why? What's it that are you trying to do?". Well, I thought the reply to that would be a pretty nice way to start this blog. The basic idea was to find a way to dump my ideas into a place where I can share them with others, pick them up later and use them. Rather than just thinking about it for a few days or months and just forgetting about it later. Thoughts are usually threaded. What you think today is usually born out of something you did before that or something that you thought a few days before. It would be nice to see those patterns.