Thursday, September 14, 2006

Ze Show Called Hackfest

I'm late jumping on this bandwagon, but I would like to sing the praises of Ze Frank's The Show videoblog (additional background info).

He's got computer and music skillz. He's humane. He's funny. He has given the best answer to "I'm going to school... what major should I choose?" that I've ever heard [transcript].

Earlier today I was going through some of the more popular shows but I stopped after hearing the brain crack show because, well, it put me in place.

For those of you who won't take my word that its worth watching a videoblog, I'll try to summarize the jist of this show: a reader asks if Ze is running out of ideas. Ze says, yes, he runs out of ideas every day. "If you don't want to run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them.... then they stay in your head forever like brain crack." He then warns us that many folks are addicted to this brain crack . These folks keep their ideas in their brains, forever imagining how great and perfectly executed these ideas will one day become. He tells us that the bummer is that most ideas suck when you do them. When Ze gets and idea - even a bad one - he tries to get it out in the world as soon as possible. And then he breaks into song. Really.

Okay, so I realized then and there that I had an addiction to brain crack. I was hoarding my Hackfest ideas. So, inspired by Ze Frank, here they are. Um, for other people to execute them.

  1. Create two-player game that is not unlike Hotbooks except that its played online only. Or create a one-player game in which certain books in a library are considered horcruxes that need to be identified and neutralized.

  2. Inspired by ASU's Index to Physical, Chemical and Other Property Data, I think we - the libraries of the world - should create a collective index to the best print resources (without online equivalents) in our reference collections. It could be a wiki but it could also be something else.

Now I realize that the fine folks running Hackfest may not need an overabundance of half-baked ideas but dammit, I can't lose the award named after me for another year!

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