Week 7 Research
More on the Project of Death
It's really scary how the weeks are flying in at the minute! My project idea is STILL too vague. If I'm to create a social networking website on "belief" alone then the possibilities are endless but I only have 12 weeks to build the thing.
I originally wanted to model the default belief system on the Christian faith as it's the one most familiar to me and my target audience (I think anyhow!). By doing this I'm limiting the sites flexibility. However if I were to create a data structure that applied to every potential belief system / religion there is, the site wouldn't have a backbone.
I'd love to find a common bond between all belief systems but it's proving to be hard.
Inspire me!
I really love the illustrations on Bookmooch.com, the free book sharing website.
The illustration above displays a certain warmth you don't normally see on the Internet. It's truly unique and captures the purpose of the site perfectly.
Next we have Siena - The Online Guide which is a tourist information site for Siena in Tuscany, Italy. Now I've never been to Siena but I'm certainly captured by the image the designer has conveyed of it through the beautiful almost 'rustic' use of colour throughout the site. There's just so much going on at once on the page but it never overwhelms you.
Now onto inspiration of a different kind altogether. I came across Shroomr Beta last night, which is a Google Maps mashup created to help people locate certain kinds of magical fungi. It's a neat enough idea if you're into this type of thing (which you shouldn't be as it's illegal!). But I can't help thinking that it'll attract the attention of the authorities to these locations, who'll then proceed to rip the hell out of the fields.
Still a neat idea though.
I'm really intrigued by the idea of vertical search engines. Spock.com is a perfect example. It indexes contact information marked up in the hCard microformat and provides a useful people search facility which also displays related people.
It's mashups like this that demonstrate the power of Microformats and semantic rich markup in general.
