Laith Zraikat: Ideas

Quality blogs or just blogs?

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 22:44:00 GMT

We love what Google has done with it's Blog Search. We love Technorati because it doesn’t just randomly index our blogs, but rather enables blogs and their content to be tagged by people and ranked based on how popular it was (traffic). We simply love the way all the search engines are optimized for searching blogs –one way or another. But amidst all of this, and with the growing popularity of blogging, there is a need that has gone un-answered; The need to find good quality bloggers.

I really can't remember the last time I used Google Blog search or Technorati to find a good Blog. The way I usually find the high quality blogs is through word of mouth, other good blogs, or through blogging communities like Jordan Planet.

Take this scenario; I read a good blogger who reads several other bloggers, so I end up catching one or two of them, who turn out to be really good as well. This is how I was introduced to a large percentage of the blogs I read.

So in addition to all the lightning fast search engines and the neatly tagged directories that are popping up here and there, we need an engine to rank bloggers based on human recommendation.

The base for such an engine would be the OPML (or Blog roll) feed which is currently used for sharing RSS feeds between bloggers. This is because OPML is already being used in a sense for recommending other blogs to readers, and because there is not one good reason why not to use it.

The engine would start with a group of hand-picked blogs which will act as the seeds, or supreme court which will kick-start the recommendation process, resulting in more blogs being added to this (seed group). Seed blogs can recommend other blogs by adding them in their Blog roll, which is picked up by the engine and recorded. Based on these recommendations, any Blog will have the chance to become a seed Blog and play a part in recommending other blogs.

Assuming that the first seed of bloggers are top notch, covering a wide variety of topics, then this engine would hold the largest variety of hand-picked content which is worth reading, anywhere on the web.

I think this would make a nice idea for an open-source project.

The Perfect Anti-Spam Solution

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 20:26:00 GMT

In response to Zeid Nasser's topic "Spam: A thing of the past!", I thought I'd share some thoughts on the topic:

Indeed SPAM is a huge burden for individuals and corporations, especially those providing e-mail services.

Everything people have been talking about to fight spam seems promising, but I'm sure that just as companies like Microsoft are developing anti-spam technologies, there are others focused on breaking through any new anti spam technology. Even the human challenge idea -which I like very much- can eventually be broken.

However, I have been reading more and more about an approach which I think could mark the end of spam once and for all. This approach suggests replacing SMTP with an RSS-like protocol.

There are three main problems which make spamming so easy;

Technology has enabled spammers to provide a fake e-mail address and mask their trails.
Email is virtually free.
With SMTP, the entire e-mail is transferred to your inbox, and by the time all spam email has been sent, the spammer has taken off and can't be tracked because there's no need to remain in the same location.

Let's take the RSS approach; RSS is completely opt-in, which means that you can choose what email to receive just like you choose what news gets into your feed reader. And while SMTP transports the entire email to your inbox after which it gets deleted from the originating server, RSS still requires you to go and fetch the rest of the content -being it news or whatever- from the server of origin.

This to me is the key ingredient in this anti-spam antidote. The fact that the content of the email is required to remain on the sender's server and be fetched by the recipient will mean three things:

Spammers can't give a fake email address to mask their location when sending emails. They have to provide the proper location when the content of their emails resides
Spammers have to maintain a permanent location from which people can download their content, which means they can't just run away.
Spammers will get charged for the emails when they are downloaded. Just like any other web site is charged for its bandwidth.

So here we have it, the perfect solution for spam. It won't be easy to implement because it means that all e-mail servers will have to ditch the SMTP and adopt the new RSS protocol. I won’t be surprised if this is one of the solutions Microsoft is working on.

Automated Speed-driving Penalty System

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:08:00 GMT

In response to Samir Rawashdeh's plead: "People of the Internet, please help!" I decided to rub my head, and come up with something.

This is an idea which will reduce speed driving and save lives. This is how it goes:

Create a GPS enabled device which can be installed in any vehicle to monitor its speed. The device will be loaded with data about the city streets; Streets are given unique code numbers, which are then associated with the GPS coordinates of its entire path. On the road, special antennas will transmit the speed limit of every street in the city. The code for each street and its speed limit are then transmitted as Key-value pairs. This data can be compressed and transmitted repeatedly as a radio broadcast with a second pause between each transmission.

This data is then collected and processed by the device on the vehicle, and stored in a tiny database. Every few seconds, the new GPS location of the vehicle is matched with the corresponding street code number from the built in street database, the number is then matched with the speed limit obtained from the radio broadcast stream.

The device will keep monitor over the car's speed. If the car exceeds the speed limit of the current street, it will alarm the driver to slow down, and give him 10 seconds to bring his speed below the limit. If the driver does not comply , the device will send a signal to receivers setup at traffic control stations around the city, which will then relay that signal to a central police database where this incident will be recorded and a ticket issued for the driver. The device then tells the driver that a ticket has been issued. If the driver still does not comply, the device will keep updating the central police database with his current speed and GPS coordinates.

I hope this helps :)