The Horizon

I have this idea for a webapp that I have been working on for the past few days here.  It involves an RSS reading interface that would be more useful for people that are on the move or traveling in any way.  The reader actually has a robut audio interface that reads feeds as well as allowing the user to access traveling widgets and to move between and share feeds.

I like the idea because I have had times where I haven’t been able to actually sit at a computer and I want to get access to my news.  One especially useful scenario would be for driving.  When I’m driving I can’t exactly be staring at a computer screen (may it be a PDA, UMPC, or a laptop) because I have to keep my eye on the road.  So I could start reading a feed to me while I drive.  The app would also be able to recognize words that the user says to it.  Think of GOOG-411: You call and it gives you search results with numbers.  That would be each article in a feed. So the audio is going through some contents and the user says “4.”  This tells the webapp to actually read through article 4.  You could also tell the webapp while it’s reading the headline and teaser to “read this.”

I’m sure the idea is not unheard of.  I wonder if it would be difficult to implement such an application.  I am now making it my quest to learn enough to implement such an application as the one I outlined here.   This blog will, for the time being, be a project development log for this project.

The first step that I will take will be to figure out what I will need to know and whether or not I can do this in an open-source framework.  So I will begin searching for information on information systems :P.  I will then attempt to do some project outlining.  If anyone has anything that could help me in my quest, please do tell!