The Exponent 2.0

@Zoë

Here are a few idea's about possible projects I would like to pursue with the new wave of technologies at the awesome Purdue Exponent.  They are just idea's and since I haven't been able to directly view the actual site yet or it's back end, I am not entirely sure how feasible some of these are, but I put down the most feasible ones in my best guesses to what we'll be able to do.

For starters, we need a rich and interactive experience with media on our website.  I would like to create a suite of silverlight (like flash, but better, works on windows and mac) components for our website that would allow us to create interactive graphs, charts, maps, statistics, photo galleries, etc... Instead of making a custom made flash component for each story, which is what I think people were thinking our web team might do (since it follows the graphics job model for stories), I was hoping to make reusable components.  I was hoping that we could just insert (for example) a graph control and have the web developers change some configuration file to include some numbers and the control would just render the live data without a need for a custom control for any piece of cool new media we want.  I hope this is a much more future proof and efficient manor to pursue, but it will carry a higher initial cost for development, an investment.

I would also like to see a start page, which our readers can make their home page.  Think about Firefox's quick start home page... I want it to include a google search, a few headlines, and a daily picture from the newspaper for a background.  Look at Bing.com and imagine the background picture to be our daily picture that we publish in the newspaper anyway.  We could have a small and simple news scroller at the bottom of the page with the latest headlines.  It needs to be simple, elegant and fast.  I want people to prefer it as their home page.  With this, we could really increase click through rate to our website and increase reader numbers (and ad revenue XD).

If the website allows for it, I would like to create plug ins to make our lives easier here at the Exponent.  I would like a direct plug in that updates our twitter feed at regular intervals with the most popular new headlines.  I want this scattered throughout the day, maybe 3 or 4 updates a day.

We should also look into creating a gadget/widget for windows and mac operating systems to show our latest headlines.  Any way to push our information to our users we should pursue.  It could just read off of our RSS feed.

I also have ideas for the website in particular, like comments from users, but I'll put those off until I actually know what I'm working with.