sage_joch

Part of this realization came to me because of an xkcd comic I read recently. Last year there were many revealed instances of the government violating the 4th Amendment through the forced cooperation of various tech companies. I don't believe it's a huge leap to assume they could do the same to the 1st Amendment if there were ever a caste system for Internet data.

Reasoning: an essay is a path/list of ideas, whereas a comment thread is a "manypath"/directed-graph of ideas. So the claim can be reduced to "'graph' is as fundamental a data structure as 'list'", which is uncontroversial.

This seems unlikely to be a "new" idea, but I stumbled into it by accident and thought it was cool. Java source code below:

  // This class is in the public domain.
  public class Numbers
  {
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
      int numRows = 256;
      int numColumns = 128;
      for (int row = 0; row < numRows; row++)
      { 
        StringBuilder rowOutput = new StringBuilder();
        for (int column = 0; column < numColumns; column++)
        {
          if ((row & column) != 0)
            rowOutput.append("1");
          else
            rowOutput.append("0");
        }
        System.out.println(
          String.format("row/col %s:\t%s", row, rowOutput.toString()));
      }
    }
  }

(In case there are any legal questions, I hereby place this idea in the public domain... and I hope I'm not having a Michael Scott bankruptcy declaration moment.)

High-level description

  * A site for line-by-line song lyric analysis/commentary
  * Analyses are created and voted on by users
  * Lyrics are (probably) imported by the site owner, so voting mechanisms on "songs to import" should be provided for more obscure songs
  * The site makes money by providing links to purchase the songs (similarly to Pandora)
  * Users who want to analyze a song can provide line-by-line explanations and commentary
  * Users who want to understand a song can read a highly-voted analysis
  * Users who have just fallen in love with a song can purchase it on the spot

If this already exists, it doesn't exist on the scale that it could (or else every Google search for "$song analysis" would lead to that site). The idea came to me tonight when I wanted to really understand Stairway to Heaven, and was able to write out an interpretation of it line by line.

And yes, I realize the irony of really getting Stairway to Heaven and then immediately thinking about a startup opportunity.