2000
DecemberBest tunes
Manhattan Research Inc - the collection of work Raymond Scott produced with his curiosity cabinet of electronic devices, assisted by the young Bob Moog. Regardless of the obsessive nature, Scott's output is interestingly forward looking, some imitates classical/jazz standards ala Switched-on bach but for the most part he braves a new trail of a different kind of sound. This is more pronounced on the Soothing sounds for baby albums with the long format, but this record cements him as a pioneer. The sample also makes a fine ringtone (for when my wife calls).
March Degree Audit
Really a labor of love (and somewhat a personal crusade) we made the degree audit system available this month. IT was a huge effort with special shouts out to Bob Fisher for the rather brilliant data loading techniques. Built upon Miami's DARS back end, the idea was not only to take in the degrees which change every year, but the waived and subsituted courses, plus a bit of pixie dust and magic, this is delivered on the web 24/7. The personal bit was the pain I used to experience doing these all by hand. Since we are growing 30 % a quarter, this allows the same advising staff to handle 70% more people in the same amount of time. Not to mention students doing it themselves and avoiding queuing up for advising that isn't high value, just paperwork. A lesson learned is that computers can do a lot of heavy lifting, but the data has to be pretty good, or else give people a way to fix the data, or else the process is scrapped as being inaccurate.
February Meme or proto digg
Wrote the basic ideas for the meme system, a reaction to how forums/listserv groups had too much noise to signal. How can you get users to both contribute meaningfully (no lurkers) and keep down junk in online discussions. Part of the idea was the life and death of a subject, people had to vote and contribute to keep a discussion alive or else it will be deleted. Also, use data mining to take subjects for students (I couldn't imagine this working without filtering, but perhaps...) and auto-create subjects that people can find reasons to discuss. This was the coctail party element, you all have something in common, please discuss.
In retrospect, some of these ideas certainly seem DIGG like, although the closed system and invitation system was somewhat like LinkedIn. I think the concept is strong, if the crash had not come and who knew of web 2.0 at this time, it would have been worth pursuing. Not sure if I have the entrepeneur in me, however.
Did I party like it was 1999? Find out here