I am currently starting a new project and this post is serving as a brain dump at the moment. This is a first pass at trying to define what the project should encompass in words.

Let’s hope I’m not being too ambitious.

Currently code named collective consciousness, it is an api that will provide contextual emotional feedback based on information available on the internet.

The idea is inspired by works such as We Feel Fine, tweetfeel and others. I hope to build upon those in a more open manner so that as the technology changes, the api can adapt through the community. I’m also hoping that as we determine what types of data makes up a collective emotional state we can adapt the system to take these into account as well.

Also serving as inspiration is the Evri api, but it’s closed system doesn’t give me exactly what I have in mind.

From the development perspective, I’m currently debating between github and google code. I’m also debating signing onto the whole google hosted app engine…
I apparently have some catching up to do to find out where my niche community of developers are. I need to find out where those who are interested in working on this are hanging out online. I need to know what they are coding in and hopefully that will help me determine what the best technology stack may be.

Overall, I see the application taking on a plug-in type structure. The core of the application will be responsible for most of the data crunching. The plug-ins will be responsible for integrating the types of sources that the api will support, the output results (percentages, total list of data, etc) and the output format (xml, json, etc) for the api.
Examples of source plugins:
- weather
- popular news (CNN, NYT, FOX)
- comments from users on popular content
- music
- blogs
- comments on blogs
- status updates
- providing localized searches on criteria and sources

Outside projects that might be a good foundation to build into the app:
OpenAmplify

Please reach out to me if you are interested in helping, have some good advice on running an open source project or have insight to any of the issues I’ve been pondering above.