What is the "NEWS Stumbler Project"
For anyone that's saying ???? after my post about the "News Stumbler Project"  here's the scoop. I want to develop the platform for an Open International Public Accessible News Network made up of freely available off the shelf parts, nodes which I'm presently calling "micro news content transmitters". A decentralized mobile network that anyone can use to access news while driving 65 MPH through any zone in the network. One thet brings some of this syndicated blog news out to the physical wireless edges. The intial design at least is simple and not a mobile network designed for retrieving email, live streaming audio/video or making a VOIP call (yet in the future when the nodes become more dense it may be possible to overlay such a network with these requirements on top of this architecture to meet that design). I been reading online about and hacking my new LinkSYS WRT-54G a lot this week trying to piece my ideas together into a real starting point to do experimentation and testing.
So here goes my fist impressions and brain dump on how to do this after one night of playing with my first WRT-54G.
First, you will need an independent WRT-54G router to join the network. This will be especially important in the beginning since we don't want to be hacking with someone's production WAP. We don't need any email or bad press from angry spouses and/or kids about dad or mom bringing down the home wireless network. This is really not a problem anyway since a new unit can be bought for less then $100 and a used one even cheeper.
The architecture design of the network is really to keep it simple and small in memory footprint since we don't have really much memory to play with in the present crop of cheap off the shelf boxes. The SSID of a box that participates in the network needs to be consistant with all other participates. I like the idea of using "opennews" at the moment but I'm open for better suggestions.
The web server address on the wireless side of the box may need to be consisitant with the rest of the network also (I know this means one http server for overlapping nodes - we will keep this in mind and see if we can better deal with this later). We could also make the assumption that the web server's address is the same as the router's address handed out during the dhcp negotiation. Or we could use dns and an "opennews" dns entry.
So, if your client news stumbling software knows the news network's SSID, the default open news webserver's IP address and port, the only other thing else it needs to know is the default index page file name. Knowing these 3 things really starts the design of the stumbling news client. Any takers?
I'm still thinking about what format the default index page should be. opml, rss, atom or maybe some totally new xml format just for this.
Which leaves me what will be the content mode of operation. What's the form? Text, audio or video or a little bit of everything. Since the design is based around stumbling onto news or retrieving the news moving at 65 MPH who really is the audience? The mobile driver or the passengers. Really 2 completely different audiences. One that only has ears (eyes, hands and feet spoken for) and whose attention is partly taken and another that is probably really bored with all available senses and attention. The goal should be to satify both? Maybe we need a driver and passenger tag!!
If you know of a similiar effort going on let me now!
Stay tuned!!
7:33:46 AM 
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