Hackday is almost upon us. Tomorrow, I—along with hundreds of other geeks—will be converging on Alexandra Palace in North London for two days of dev fun.
I’ve got an idea for what I want to do but I think I’ll need lots of help. At XTech, Reboot, @media and other recent geek gatherings I’ve been asking who’s coming and who fancies helping me out. I’ve managed to elicit some interest from some very smart people so I’m hoping that we can hack something fun together.
Here’s the elevator pitch for my idea: online publishing is hacking and slaying.
Inspired by Justin Hall’s idea of Passively Multiplayer Online Games and Gavin Bell’s musings on provenance, I want to treat online publishing as an ongoing way of building up a character. In Dungeons and Dragons or World of Warcraft, you acquire attributes like stamina, strength, dexterity and skill over time. Online, you publish Flickr pictures, del.icio.us links, Twitter updates and blog posts over time. All of this published material contributes to your online character and I think you should be rewarded for this behaviour.
It’s tangentially related to the idea of a lifestream which uses RSS to create a snapshot of your activity. By using APIs, I’m hoping to be able to build up a much more accurate, long-term portrait.
I’m going to need a lot of clever hackers to help me come up with the algorithms to figure out what makes one person a more powerful Flickrer or Twitterer than another. Once the characteristics have been all figured out, we can then think about pitching people against each other. Maybe this will involve a twenty-sided die, maybe it will more like Top Trumps, or maybe it could even happen inside Second Life or some other environment that has persistent presence (the stateless nature of the Web makes it difficult to have battles on a Web site). I have a feel that good designers and information architects would be able to help me figure out some other fun ways of representing and using the accumulated data. Perhaps we can use geo data to initiate battles between warriors in the same geographical area.
Sound like fun? Fancy joining in? Seek me out on the day or get in touch through my backnetwork profile.
Of course, if you want to do something really cool at hackday, you’ll probably be dabbling with arduino kits, blubber bots and other automata. When I was San Francisco a few weeks ago, nosing around the Flickr offices, Cal asked me what I was planning for Hackday. “Well” I said, “it involves using APIs to…” “Pah!” he interrupted, “APIs are passé. Hardware is where it’s at.”