Hack Day Idea

As you probably already know, given that I’ve been talking about it constantly on Jaiku for weeks, I’m going to the BBC/Yahoo Hack Day in London on 16/17 June.

I’m not going as one of the designer/developers building stuff, I’m going as a steward for the BBC so I’m not sure I’ll get much of a chance to build anything but I do have a couple of ideas.

As I’m a generous kind of guy, and the ideas aren’t really that great, I thought I’d share a few of them with you, my wonderful blog readers, and you, the not quite as wonderful casual browsers.

The first idea I plan to share is called Grumpy Geeks - Ofload the moan and it’s one I’ve been toying with working on for a year or so but never got around to.

It’s part Twitter, part therapy, part time waste and all fun.

Offload the Moan

So we take a web full of grumpy geeks, people annoyed with every aspect of 21st Century life and not enough time to write a blog post about it (like that will ever happen).

Mr Grump arrives at a webpage and is shown a simple box with a question above it “What’s bugging you today”. Mr Grump offloads his moan into the box and pushes send.

Underneath the box the moan is shown and two options - Happy or Sad (Annoy me More or Cheer me Up).

If Mr Grump clicks Happy he’ll be shown photos from flickr that are the opposite of his complaint - if he says “I hate cats, one scratched me” he’ll be shown a photo of a cat being thrown across the room.

He’ll also be shown grumps from other people with the same moan and a conversation can be started (other info could be pulled in from other sources as well).

IF Mr Grump decided to be further annoyed (geeks are weird creatures), he’ll be shown photos of fluffy kittens looking all cute and annoying from flickr.

He’ll also be shown comments pulled in from the blogosphere from people that LIKE/LOVE cats and are all gooey about them (again other info could be pulled in).

So there you go - a simple idea to play with - what do you think?

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