Monday, March 19, 2007

Total saturation

I want this to be a TV channel, but it might work better as a website. Or a search engine. Let me explain.

There is often a sense of wanting to experience something, but with no clear definition of how you want to experience it. Say you remember a kids program you used to watch, like the Smurfs. But it isn't really that you just want to watch an episode of the Smurfs. You want to experience the Smurfs. Just to remind yourself of that time.

Maybe what we're talking about here is not a search engine, but a nostalgia engine. That's it. You type in the show (Seinfeld) or era (80's), or whatever, that you are nostalgic for and you are instantly inundated with video, text, audio, images, trivia, and everything else you could think of that pertains to your terms.

A search engine gives you results that you then have to sort through. And you can't really get all those things on one page. But you could with the nostalgia engine. It would combine all the best parts of youtube, wikipedia, and google. And yes, people much smarter than me would have to put this together.

I would use this. Kids writing papers would use this. People bored at parties would use this. Isn't this what the internet was meant for?

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