Ian On The Red Dot

First, the non-idea. Let’s not build the whole infrastructure from scratch just to implement whatever ideas we do have for taking the Youth Olympic Games online.

Example of an Idea: Hey, you know what, let’s allow people to share their homemade videos of the YOG.

Example of what we should not do: Build our own backend to store the videos.

Example of what we could do: Host the videos on YouTube. Create a website that allows people to upload their videos of the YOG. Use the new YouTube API to save the videos on YouTube servers. The YOG website just aggregates videos stored on YouTube.

Why: Save Money. Stand On The Shoulders Of Giants. Don’t Do Something From Scratch Just For The Sake Of Doing It.

Now, for my idea.

We setup Flickr-booths around the island with iconic buildings and scenery as the background. People take photos at the booths and the pictures are instantly uploaded to Flickr tagged appropriately. A YOG site aggregates these photos.

How to do this. Simple actually. Get Apple to sponsor tons of their iMacs. Protect their computers with a telephonebooth-like shelter. Use their PhotoBooth software as well as plugins like FlickrBooth to take the photos and immediately upload it to Flickr.

Do a similar thing for videos. Again, get Apple to sponsor tons of iMacs and put them at spots around the sportsmen/sportswomen village. Use the iSight camera to create videos which are immediately uploaded to YouTube. I’m sure a simple plugin can be written for this if it has not already been done so. A YOG site aggregates these videos.

Let’s look at the cost here. Hmmm… There are the computers and the booths and the website to aggregate links to the videos and photos. I think cost of computers and booths can be covered by sponsorship and official partners.

Last part of the idea which might be the one with significant costs - all participants of the YOG are issued some EZLink-like card which contains all the important details about them. When they take a photo or make a video, they tap the card against some device attached to the computer which then appends all these details as tags for the video or photo. Even better, use RFID so no tapping is needed.

The metadata is needed so that the YOG website can better aggregate the videos and photos.

This is my idea. What do you guys think about it?