A few Ideas ...

Here is a list of ideas I have for research or business (start-ups). I have many others, but have not had a chance to write them down. (Why open my ideas? Well, I thought I might get shares from you folks. ha ha ha. Besides, ideas not implemented are useless.)

• Log files and search engines (December 2005): There's a problem in analyzing system log files. Too many files and data to analyze. But, search engine is capable in processing large data. So, the idea is to put log files on the net and let search engines index them and analyze them. Problems: security and privacy. These logs contain IP addresses, domain names, hostnames, userids, (passwords?,) daemons, and other data. Perhaps IP/name scrubber can be used to map these data to other symbols / data.
• Profiling my emails (December 2005): The idea is to go through my emails and do some analysis on them. It would be nice if these can be done through Gmail. That is, using Gmail API (if exists?) to do some statistics. Even better if the query(ies) and processing are done at Gmail's servers :) PS: Trying to understand emails (clustering emails) is currently the thesis topic of my student. I am thinking of visual clustering ala liveplasma.com. Perhaps Google is willing to fund this research? Got contact at Google?
• Personal Digital Assistant (Since 1996): No, it's not those PDAs (Newton, Palm, O2, iPaq, etc.). This is my obsession since early 90s. The idea is to create my "digital secretary," who "understands" my digital life. The first stage, let "her" understands my emails first. I've been trying to put my emails in database and analyze them. For example "she" should understand my mailing lists and archive them automatically (or even suggest to unsubscribe if I've not read that list for more than 3 months).
  Every morning, when I open my computer it will greet me
  .
  Good morning, Budi
  You have 161 new emails. I have filtered 803 junk mails
  3 emails are urgent
  I have arranged with your ISP to archive your old emails (which is about 1.618 TBytes). Your frequently read emails are still in your current mailbox
  You have not read teknologia mailing list since 3 months ago. Should I unsubscribe? Or remind you again tomorrom?
  .
  It could be more complex than that. But, that's ok for now. (During the early Java[station] era, I though this was one of the problems I have to solve. I have too many emails and it was cumbersome to go through my emails. Gmail has not solved my problems yet.) Also, I've read in a recent IEEE Spectrum about Gordon Bell's digital life project at Microsoft. Perhaps Google and/or Microsoft is interested in funding this research?
• Homebase (since 1996): When you logged in to a computer, you are given a home directory. You can view the directory as an unstructured database, where you can store data / information in form of files. There are services that provide storage for images (flickr, etc.), but no services to provide structured data (as in database). I think there is an interest to provide public database services. I can login to my database and create tables for my (personal) applications. These databases are accessible through network. When I heard the word "Googlebase," I thought about this kind of service. But, it is not. The tools are there, but don't know the scalability.