The second week is over. And during this week, I had the opportunity to listen Chris Heilman (Mozilla) and John Resig (JQuery creator) ideas about the possibilities of HTML5 as an element of transformation for the Web and how create and maintain a open source software project that not only is limited to the technical side but also implies to consolidate a community, in order to produce one of the most powerful and used Javascript library.
HTML5: During his presentation, Chris shows us many features available in HTML5. I was amazed about features that I have not listened before like: hardware integration, UI input related attributes like placeholders, etc. Plus, Chris share with us many interesting and worth links like HTML5 Boilerplate (A great source to learn HTML5 and CSS3 tricks using an existing code) and Modernizr (An HTML5 feature detection library), which are great tools to explore (and develop) using HTML5.
JQuery: John told us about his experience developing JQuery and the key to create a successful product and community. During this presentation, it caught my attention the high amount of websites worldwide that use JQuery and the strategies that JQuery community use to spread the word about JQuery and support new developers to use and be involve in the development.
Continuing with my idea for the course final project, I receive a comment from Stijn Debrouwere about the idea of combining many features and don’t have a specific purpose (or at least consolidated idea) for my final project. So, I decide to re-think about the features and I redefine my idea:
The idea is to create a tool that helps journalists to automatize and present additional information related with their news, this additional information could be: Description or facts about the mentioned entities in the news, additional data visualizations and user generated comments.
But this time instead create a mockup, I decide to start a prototype (using JQuery+JQuery UI and .NET) available in the following URL:
http://184.72.38.228/NewsApp2/
To use the app, first, the journalist has to decide if he wants to create a news from nothing or use an already create news from AP. Then, the journalist only have to modify the news content and use the “Process” button in order to let the app analyze the content and suggest entities.
Additionally, but not implemented in the prototype. The journalist can include some visualization using a step-by-step wizard, the idea is to offer an easy way to create visualization and even use some pre-created visualization using content text such as word clouds, entities diagrams, etc.
Finally, the comments sections will also let the readers include any comment about what they read and using the hyperlinks inside the news, they will also be able to filter entities and comments, in a similar way to my first idea.
dhbello 
Hi David,
Good to see you experimenting with quick prototypes. However, my suggestion would be to re-focus on the idea of the “minimum viable product.” You have several ideas listed above, and I would propose that it would benefit your project to focus exclusively on one.
The entity extraction is interesting, but not ground-breaking on its own. Ask: How can a tool like entity extraction be made even more useful, or usable, than it is today.
–Phillip.