Today, I am launching on MAX POWER into my authorship project. You may think that I should have launched 3 weeks ago but I’ve been calculating where I’m headed and in this case UP seemed quite elusive. In addition to this let me assure you that the masochistic eyelid rippling intensity of this launch will make up for any previous dithering and fastidious pre-flight checks. So to mark the occasion I will outline what my project will be:
It’s called MindField and it’s basically a collaborative brainstorming tool that uses the interrelations of tags to form a ‘web of tags’. Although rather than appearing as web like tradiotional brainstorms it’ll be more like a number of stacks of boxes with a heading above them. This is mainly due to technical restrictions as I developing an application that can actually display my info in the form of a proper brainstorm would take too much time, effort and probably require use of flash which would detract from the aim of this project: learning how to create dynamic websites with PHP & mySQL. Users will also be able to make ‘notes’(similar to comments) on tags which will be displayed in a pop-up bubble on hovering over items in the ‘mindfield’ (which I think require javascript); if i can find a tutorial and have time.
The homepage will be quite simple and google-esque with a logo, login form, searchbar and a large tag cloud that will help users begin using ‘MindField’ if their unsure of what to do or haven’t got anything they particularly want to search for. I’ve created a css template which you can view here, which s incidently hosted on my new site (oliverbourne.com) hosted for a year(dreamhost.com) for $9.50 with a ridiculous amount of space(500gb) and bandwidth usage. The catch is that if I carry on hosting with them next year it will be about over 10 times that, also it’s hosted in the US so accessing it from the UK isn’t quite as speedy.
Anyway I’ve tried to design it so it’s as quick to start using as possible and also as quick to expand as possible. The advantage of my ‘web of tags’ concept over having individual pages each with their own specific brainstorm (such as other collaborative brainstorm sites such as mindmeister.com do) is that once some has created a tag for say ‘life’ every time life comes up in a brainstorm it comes ready with a set of related tags that branch off from life and those branches then branch off again as they too come with a set of related tags. The number of branches coming off each tag would have to be limited and so would the number of levels the brainstorm has (according to popularity of each tag) otherwise it would become ridiculously overcrowded very difficult to use. This makes it very quick to expand and form a service that users would want to use.
The disadvantage of this method is that the brainstorms generated would probably be quite generic and not much use for specialist information or obscure or original connections. However it would provide a good way to quickly research the interrelations of a topic as perceived by the general public or at least the general obscure web app savvy public.
In order to encourage people to use the site I’ve tried to design it so that you don’t need to be a registered user to access it and you can do most things including search for and create/add to tags without registering. If you were a reg user then the advantages wold be that you could add notes to tags which would be recorded on a profile page and also the history of tags you’d visited. If the tag you search for isn’t already in existence then you will be taken to a simple form where you can add the tag and specify it’s related tags. I might even include the related tags field under the search bar and with “(optional)” next to it in order to cut one step out of the process and encourage as much tagging as possible. To ensure that the tags are all in the same format I would have some guidelines appear when you place you cursor in the searchbar such as; no capitals, separate tags with a comma, use underscores for spaces, ensure correct spelling. In addition to this I might write some PHP that removes capitals etc and reformats entered tags in the correct format. By doing this it would reduce the amount of different tags there are for the same subject.
I plan to use tag clouds to show an expanded version(in a pop-up bubble) of the related tags for each branch in a brainstorm or ‘MindField’ but apparently they are very difficult to do.
Also each tag will be accompanied by a wikipedia search link so that it’s easy for people to explore ideas that they have while using ‘MindField’. This expands the potential of the site very easily and gives wikipedia users (almost everyone) added incentive to use ‘MindField’.
Once the database has built up I would probably make it so only reg users could tag. I think that the walled garden model of user access is a very bad decision unless you already have a strong reputation or have a business plan for expansion such as targeting businesses or instituitions which is what I expect facebook did when started.
This is my Second Life avatar, My name is Slim Camel.
