All Things Distributed

The Ultimate PDC Ticket Contest

Jeff  Sandquist wants to know what kind of contest he could run that would make the powers-that-are interested in handing a few free tickets to the PDC. (Scoble says that Jeff really has tickets to give away). I am not interested in participating in such a contest as I was already handed my ticket, but I think this contest should result in something that would be useful to webloggers at the PDC.

Drawing on my years of experience in making up interesting student projects I believe the contest should deliver the following:

The ultimate real-time PDC weblog aggregator.

This is a web-site/blog-engine that:

• will  display a real-time view of the related entries/excerpts made by bloggers at the PDC
• which each blogger at the PDC can include in it list of sites to ping through trackback
• or if the blogger doesn't use a trackback enabled blog-engine through alternative means, triggering a read of the weblogger's rss file.
• The site will keep an archive of the postings.

Besides these basic requirements, extra points will be given for:

• Weblogger registration with the engine to get some form of authentication.
• Devise a mechanism such that bloggers can indicate which session they where blogging from
• Provide a sort of category view per individual session or per subject area.
• Provide an nice overview of the agenda of all sessions at the pdc and allow visitors to view blog-entries related to each session.
• Anything that will surprise the judges to show that you have gone the 'extra mile' to make this work

Basic requirement is that the site is written in appropriate ASP.NET/CLR Llanguages such that it runs under IIS 6.0 on win2k3. It is OK to steal code from existing blog-engines. You do need to show what you did to show that you should win this contest.

If this would work out I would certainly be willing to host the engine.