Does anyone wan to help make a quick website that could answer this eternal question, and perhaps spread a bit of environmental advice as it goes?

Along the lines of isitChristmas, but obviously localised by Post Code, the site would offer RSS and iCal feeds of whether it’s bin day for you — with reminders the day before, and telling you what week it is for recycling purposes (green or paper/plastic) for those that have differences. Along with this simple, but useful service it could impart environmental advice and info slipped into the RSS as well as somewhere on the site. It could even do calculations of stuff like “my council doesn’t collect X, is it better to just bin or drive it to the recycling centre?”.

It could get a few ads from electricity suppliers etc to pay its way perhaps.

I’ve been thinking some more about the whole, information overload, autogenerated echo, crossposting thing.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want RSS feeds aggregated for me on yet another web service, I don’t want every feed from every person and have to filter them out (and for duplicates). In short I want all my information in one place, custom search feeds and the like as well as people’s RSS, news as well as flickr tag feeds.

I like the Google Reader experience, I like that it’s in sync across my laptop, my phone, other computers. Google Reader could blow FriendFeed and others away if it implemented a few new features.

Here’s my new feature wishlist for Google Reader:

• The ability to filter feeds as the come in (by location would be great, I have a lot of searches for “Birmingham” and only want the UK versions).
• The ablitity to remove duplicate items from different feeds (and chose which “original” version remains). Two examples: blog/news results in my search feeds when I already subscribe to the originating feed. Also removing auto generated posts: twitters in friends’ Facebook statuses or “daliy links” posts in blogs when I already subscribe to the del.icio.us feed.
• Filters to “mark as read” posts (similar to GMail). By tag would be fine — Google Reader’s search feature is brilliant (allowing you to seach within everything that’s come through), there are things I’d like to be able to search (obsure news feeds, heavy feeds like Digg content) but I don’t want to have them as outstanding posts to be read. You’d be building up your own subset of the web.
• See other people’s notes (if shared of course) — the new notes feature is great, you could have a conversation with the notes if you could see other peoples’. A little like the “comment on anything” stuff that people are hot for on FriendFeed.

I’ve had this idea for a while, but want to get it down on ‘paper’ so people might be able to take the idea and sort it out. I could probably hack together the software side myself (not quickly, it’s a big job), but there’s a huge need for hardware and legal back-up to get it to work properly which I don’t have.

It combines three technologies, but aims to solve the problem of knowing how to be good. In short “should I buy this product”, “how does it sit with my values”. For example you may decide that you don’t want to buy any products from Heinz (as I don’t), but Heinz are a large company - it’s not always obvious in the supermarket which company ultimately owns which brand. Or despite the labeling, how can you really work out the food miles in some products?

In this system you can use your mobile phone to scan the barcode (already possible on the Nokia N95, but you could write an image processing app for most camera phones that are coming out onto the market now) and a small application on the phone interfaces with a website to give you the information as to whether the product sits in your ‘ethical space’.

You would have to sign up to the site and set ‘ethical sliders’ showing your views on different issues (animal welfare, economics, food miles, fair trade, local issues) and also your home area (for calculating some distance based ethics). You could then get a personalised yay or nay on each product you were unsure about.

Two potential problems here - collecting and updating all the information, which would hopefully be solved by using a very tight database and allowing users to add information on each product (if a barcode wasn’t in the database , you’d get some sort of message asking you to help populate the information). Luckily I think that a lot of this information is already collected by campaigners and if it was easy enough to add to the database on the site it could be filled up quite quickly. The other main problem is the litigious nature of major corporations, this product would have to have some very good PR and legal back-up, and be prepared for a long fight.

The project could self-finance in a number of ways, for a start there would be a wealth of accurate and self-entered data on shopping requirement that could be used for research (and sold perhaps, once de-personalised - the ethics research itself could act as a pressure on retailers and suppliers), the site woudl also be able to offer very tightly focused advertising online (even on the phone app itself, IN the supermarket, offering an alternative product that did fit in with the ethical map of the user).

It’s a social web-app, a wiki-database- and mobile technology. It’s very clever I think, technologically possible now and broadly speaking very 2.0. It just needs a cool name.

Niche perhaps, but niche broadcasting is the future - especially when it comes so easily and re-uses content.

Stuck in traffic and about to miss Big Brother I thought - why isn’t the TV on the radio? We could listen to programmes that are already done with audio description (you can find the channels right up the top somewhere if you’ve got Sky) - it’d only cost space on the dial.

Currently there isn’t enough space on FM or MW, but surely it could be squeezed onto DAB.

up yer Brum is my latest project, the idea originally was simply a sort of ‘Brum Blogs’ aggregator, but it’s got a lot more complicated. The front page shows items on the web (technorati, dell.icio.us, flickr, youtube )tagged ‘upyerbrum’ - as well as the most popular links already submitted - and lets people vote on them or submit them to the ‘digg’ part of the site.

It uses Pligg, an open source digg clone, Magpie RSS as well as some nice php and css that I’ve got to grips with specially for this project. I really hope that it’ll take off, although the ‘launch’ is making me a bit nervous - I think it’s the thing that I’ve invested most time in for ages.

Try it, carefully now…

up yer Brum :: promoting the best of Birmingham on the web