More Thoughts on FlashMeme
Thanks for all the great feedback and comments about my FlashMeme idea that I posted yesterday. There has a been an overwhelmingly positive response to it and loads of great suggestions too.
Yesterday I just wrote the idea down that was in my head without a great amount of planning or thought, so I thought I’d expand on some of the details and suggestions that people have made as well as fleshing out the concept a little more.
Just to reiterate the idea of FlashMeme:
Someone sends you a USB memory stick filled with their digital memes (things like their favourite software, music, videos, pdfs, pictures etc) that person then puts their memes on the stick and sends it onto a friend.
Google Maps
Dan made a great suggestion yesterday to make use of Google maps to track the journeys of the sticks as the are sent around the globe, the easiest method to use would be the new MyMaps which came out just recently although that’s not the best method to automate adding points to the map, a proper mashup may prove to be a better solution in the long term.
Waves and Donations
Depending on how the first wave of USB sticks go and how far they make it before they got lost, broken or simply not passed on, I was thinking that we could set up a system of waves, perhaps every month sending out a new set of sticks to a different group of people, this could be funded by donations.
There is also nothing to stop anyone from just sending a USB stick to a friend without anything to do with the site, feel free to run with the idea and implement it in your own way.
A Single Text file and Disclaimer
I also been thinking about how to organize the data on the stick and whether to keep the old stuff on as well as adding your own stuff, I even pondered a Subversion repository on each stick to manage all of the memes but I think the best way to handle it is with a single text file, explaining what FlashMeme is and giving some loose instructions on what to do next. The user can then do pretty much what they like with the stick as long as that text file remains on there.
There would also have to be some kind of disclaimer in the text file warning of sharing copyrighted materials without permission, which would obviously be on your head if you choose to send anything like that, you accept the legal responsibly for breaking the copyright law.
Naming
Naming the sticks seems to be the obvious thing to do, and everyone in the comments agree, so we need suggestions for naming conventions people, all kinds of wild and crazy things, the more the better!
Logo
I had a quick think about the logo too, the main concepts that sprang to mind are: a USB stick with FlashMeme written on it or an envelope with the USB symbol on it.
Simple and Open
I want to keep the whole thing simple and open, nothing propriety or confusing because we all know thats no fun! I also don’t want to have to do loads of baby-sitting and admin work for the site. In the same spirit I think the best file format for the sticks would be FAT32 since it’s the easiest way to maintain some kind of cross platform openness.
Crowd Sourcing
Along the same lines as keeping it free and open, I thought it might be interesting to try crowd sourcing some elements of the site, similar to the open source communities, if anyone feels like helping out with copy writting, logos or designs, I’m happy to open it up to the floor and I think the project will become better than it possibly could if I kept it closed and did all of the work myself.
If anyone else would like to become more deeply involved, or take up an admin kinda role just let me know.
Rails site
Initially I thought i could manage the whole thing with a wordpress blog but it’s becoming obvious that a more bespoke site will be required if only to reduce the amount of admin work. With that in mind I’m thinking of making a special website in Ruby on Rails, so we can keep all of the different elements together and make the site easier to use and more seamless to the users.
More Questions
- How should the signup system work?
- Where is a good place to buy some USB sticks in Bulk?
- What features should be on the website?
- Any more thoughts or concept drawings on the logo?
Thanks again for all of the great feedback so far, keep it coming! Keep your eyes on FlashMeme.com for even more details coming soon.
if your simply doing a text file, you could use smaller memory sticks, something like 128mb or so. this would initially help keep the data simple and stop people from snagging the sticks and not passing them on.
as far as a naming system, you should let the users change the name as well and it could be the first line of the meme description… something like this…
pepsi - wizard sent to mandaloo - linux how to pdf, audioslave sound clip, pictures of his truck
redipod - mandaloo sent to neener - pictures of vw bug, lego castle howto
duracel - neener sent to teabass - pictures of guitar, white stripes sound clip, wordpress-v2.1.zip
…etc.
jeromy on April 15, 2007 1:02 am
another thought… pen drives only last a certain number of read/writes. perhaps if someone gets a drive that dies, they can buy a new one and send the dead one to the first person who started the drive’s life, as a token of it’s courage.
i’m thinking of something like… http://www.wheresgeorge.com/
jeromy on April 15, 2007 1:05 am
jeromy — I think what Andrew meant was that there would be an initial text file with the basic rules and disclaimer and such, not that text files would be all that’s on there.
Depending on how often you want the stick to be wiped, 1gb would probably be sufficient. Plus, the read/write cycle limit on USB drives is pretty high, last I checked — several hundred thousand to over a million. I don’t think that’ll be a concern for quite some time.
And I’d stick to a single name per drive. It’ll make it easier to track what’s where.
Tigerblade on April 15, 2007 1:21 am
maybe allow for registration of new drives on the site - that way people (like me) who have a few older USB thumbdrives could register them and look up people willing to accept them/pass them on.
As to what to put on the drives, a good place to start might be “something you are, something you know, something you have”.
There’s got to be a way to upload a csv file or something to MyMaps.
Maybe someone should only be able to receive a drive once they’ve sent one out, and someone else has confirmed receipt? (see registration idea above)
The Technocrat on April 15, 2007 5:14 pm
another problem that you might have is carrying viruses from one infected pc to another. that would not make too many people happy. they think that they get nice stuff on the usb stick and they end up having to deal with viruses.
Patrick on April 16, 2007 5:10 pm
Ah yeah… I forgot about that.. poor windows users
I’ve pretty much completely forgotten about virus and spyware etc since I switched!
Andrew on April 16, 2007 5:14 pm
Just saw this. Thought it was a cool idea.
I’ve thought of doing a similar thing with Geocaching and leaving smaller cheaper Thumb drives in caches and see how they get moved around and added to.
Jonathan Blundell on June 8, 2007 8:02 pm