Some of you may be aware of the IEMChat project (https://iemchat.com), with which I am involved.
Working with that and living in the mid-west of the USA today, where we
had a rather unusual significant earthquake, has convinced me of the
idea that one of the things that will help draw people into the world of
XMPP is if real-time resources such as weather updates and earthquake
information are easily and readily available via XMPP technologies.
Working with IEMChat has shown me that the idea works, and works well.
And, relatedly, having experienced this earthquake this morning and the
significant aftershock in the late morning, and seeing people show up in
the IEMChat chatrooms to see if there was any information there about
the earthquake(s) has shown me that doing the same for earthquake
information would seem to be very useful.
More generally, I was wondering if there was any place that could post
other ideas along these lines (other than this list)...maybe something
like a wiki where ideas like this could be collected so people that are
looking for simple projects that would be cool, could be collected to find.
So, for example, with the earthquake info, the USGS has a near-realtime
feed of information that use their own protocol. They have a Java
utility to receive those events and drop them in a file or is also able
to fire off a script. A bit of simple parsing of the events, and some
not-so-simple integration with some GIS information could result in a
very cool resource for earthquakes that is very much in line with the
sorts of reports that iembot posts. As the admin of the server that the
public version of IEMChat runs on, I think it would be fantastic if a
bot such as this were to use the same room breakdown for posting reports.
Anyway...just kind of some blue sky thinking ideas, both the specific
one regarding earthquakes, and the more general one of having a place to
post such ideas to be collected.
Thoughts, ideas, comments, suggestions, volunteers, whatever...just
trying to spark some creative thoughts, here.
--
Jeff McAdams
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin
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