I have an idea! Part 4
Andrew Wasilczuk, Darq (an open source networking consultancy)
Ian Morrison, Darq
Our idea is based on the premise that adverts are bad on websites as they are a waste of bandwidth and screen real estate – they take up room which could be better used. We want to repurpose that space and filter out the adverts and replace them with relevant content. We would implement it by replacing things like Google ad words with relevant data that’s helpful to the university member. So if a student goes to Google and does a search for, say, context switching, Google returns its normal results but, instead of ads on the right hand side of the screen, there would be a box containing local resources. Local in this sense is local to the institution that the user is acessing it from eg links to local library and books relevant to the search, student forums, course notes from the intranet and so on.
Google is very relevant but it is relevant on a global scale – we want to make it relevant on a local scale. An application server, a widget, will generate these local frames, inject them into the page and that widget talks to a sever which knows the answers – a local semantic web. At a simple level we take out the adverts and replace them with something else. What that something is depends on what there is a need for.
It could be done with a Firefox plug-in but then it becomes something else a user has to configure so, to make it easier and remove deployment issues, we would do it at the network level with a transparent proxy (a machine that sits between you and the internet and looks at the traffic and removes the adverts and injects our content). It would happen automatically if the user is connected to the university network.