Assignment 1 - too many ideas.....

So I have 2 ideas that I can't choose between.....

1) Personal Pantry

I have no idea exactly how this would work, but I constantly go to the grocery store, buy food for things I think I might like to make, bring it home and promptly forget about exactly what I have. The sour cream gets lost in the back of the fridge, I have many bottles of things, cans of stuff that I rarely use and I would be embarrassed to talk about the numbers of time I have had to throw out broccoli.

What I want is a site that is connected to the checkouts at the grocery stores (note this is not just for ONE store but all the stores I shop at) so it knows what I just bought. This site would perform 3 main functions. 1) keep track of the types of food and when I should use it after it has been bought (cook that chicken tonight!), 2) provide suggestions for recipes based on the food I actually have in the house and 3) based on regular food shopping habits, provide suggested grocery lists and alerts (you are out of laundry detergent!).

The issue would be finding a way to quickly and easily let the site know that a certain item had been used or how MUCH of it had been used....haven't figured out the logistics of that yet.


2) Trust Monitor

For something completely different....an area of personal interest is the intersection between online health information, health literacy, web skills and trust. It is a very tricky area because when you get knee deep into it, there are so may skills that a person needs to be able to evaluate the credibility of any website. One particularly interesting study I read talked about the 6 different areas in which a person needs to be literate to be able to make use of online health information (health, computer, traditional verbal and numerical, information, science and media literacies). I won't get too deep into this because it is kind of a quagmire, but what I want to see is some kind of online app that helps users be able to evaluate and understand the quality (and bias ) of the information provided on a website. There would also be an accompanying website that categorized different major sites in terms of trust/quality/bias for users who don't have the capacity to do that easily and quickly themselves

One of the issues with search engines is that they do search EVERYTHING and particularly where health information is concerned there is a lot of very questionable / biased / misinformation, some of which borders on dangerous in the online health space. For many users, this is not problematic but for low literacy, low education users who are usually low income and also fall into a group who can have many health problems this is particularly problematic.

However I also don't advocate telling users "trust x, don't trust y"' because that doesn't solve the problem. The beauty of the internet is that even if you want to post something totally crazy and wierd you can. What I would build is a site and a tool that to help users understand what about information from source x is considered good or not, why they might or might not want to trust it.

Is this possible? Who knows? Would it work? Don't know that either. But I hate the idea that we are at a point that all this good, free, useful information is available but some of the people who need it most can't reach it even if they do get their hands on a computer.

And More

Also thought about.....pulling together weather information and gps and geographic information to help farmers (particularly third world) decide which crops to plan, when to rotate, how to make the most of what they have, how to limit damage in cases of storms/floods etc in real time. As climates change and shift, this information is going to become more and more important.

Original Thoughts?

Not so much....this blog has been created for my Information Culture class but will no doubt be useful for recording all the other non-original thoughts spilling out of my head.....

Not a particularly interesting first post. But it exists which is the important thing.