Ach, no time...

I havn't buried this project yet, but currently I just don't find the time to do it. I hope it will happen eventually, though! ;-)

First Project: WoW and Flickr

So, now that I have established that I want to do something with WoW and some other part of the web, I just have to find out what exactly I want to do. And, after looking around a bit, I think a fairly easy start would be to do something with WoW and the photo site Flickr.

So what's the plan? In WoW, the player can take screenshots of their avatar's adventures. Naturally, such pictures can be then be uploaded to Flickr (I already do that: check out this link for pictures tagged "wow"). Now, because Blizzard were so nice as to allow their community to easily build add-ons to World of Warcraft using some XML and the LUA scripting language, it is quite easy to log a lot of stuff while someone is playing the game. E.g., as the world of Warcraft is divided up into lots of geographical zones, it is possible to record where a player travelled, and when. If one combines this information with the timestamps on the screenshots the player takes on the way, it would be possible to produce a nice looking picture diary. And finally, because flickr offers a very nice API and fabolous documentation on how to use it, I can build all this on top of flickr.

Before I go out to have a pint, lets quickly sum up what we need:

1. Logging the player's movements. We need to be notified where a player goes and when, and we need to write this to some file, so we can work with it later.
2. Timestamps on screenshots. We need to make sure that the timestamps on the screenshots (basically the creation date of the file) are kept intact when they are transferred to flickr.
3. flickr support for timestamps. Of course, the flickr API has to support us when we want to query for pictures by timestamp.

Tomorrow I will check if all this is possible, and how exactly it could be done.

Hooking up WoW to the Web

I recently got wind of an upcoming anthology of research papers about World of Warcraft. "That's interesting", I thought, "maybe I can contribute?" Unfortunately (for me), the focus of the book is going to be sociology, literature and media research, whereas my area is computational linguistics (up until my MA) and Semantic Web (ever since I started my PhD). All the things I came up with in my head were way to techy: Could I connect my WoW account to my Flickr account? - Can I integrate WoW into the Semantic Web? None of these things would really fit into the book. However, I think it would still be a fun thing to do! Why? - Why not?

And this is why I started this blog. If I don't get a book chapter, I should at least get a blog! Whenever I get some ideas that generally relate to "Hooking up WoW to the Web", I will just jut them down here. Plans of what to do, how to do it, related things, whatever. That's the plan.