todd

Patholog Thoughts

Just a few ideas, depending on our scope and direction.

At its surface, this entity can be very large, general network...what we'd need is an army of people to fill it up (an issue we'll undoubtably address).

Not only is it large, but also very open in what we can do with it. That's where we need to focus our own specific energy.

The paths are the most developed, as I see it, and on their own very intriguing. One possibility is to just spend all our time polishing this part to a shiny, chrome finish in time for siggraph. Tripp's observations on privacy issues are certainly well warranted. Forums, blogs, and e-mail all some way of dealing with this, the patholog itself shouldn't be an exception. While I doubt it'll be this simple, permissions seem to be the way go (public, private, by group, etc).

"Real Estate" is also a concern...basically the privacy issue from the other direction. I can imagine businesses, public spaces, heck, anywhere where people would object to having some content or other existing...comparisons to grafitti are not wholly without merit. The 'net is essentially a separate space from the geographic world...you can largely avoid profanity filled forums and shady web sites...that might be more difficult when content is directly relation to where you travel. I dunno, this is probably too far in the future for this semester, but it has and will come up.

Enough of that for now...I'm also thinking about stuff to do with the data on its own, possibly independently from a given user or traveler. Y'all remember the "message in a bottle"...actually that could jive with the path database...it could create its own little virtual path, bumping into others. Anyway, that's just one of a few half-ideas I have.

Anyway, I'm still kinda for simply polishing the whole path-crossing part...we have most of the basics down, but could easily spend the semester fine-tuning. And the only questions we have left are some of the trickiest one (like permissions).

I agree that we (and probably as many others as is feasible) should simply add to the network we have. That, in and of itself, is pretty straighforward. Seeing how data grows may help us make further decisions on how we're going to use it.