Website idea or project for an animal lover

Is there a bored web master looking for a project?

[onedumbear]

Hey there all,
I would take on this idea / project myself but I already have too much to do.
Im an animal lover and also a big fan of the amber alert system. I display the amber ticker on all my sites.
How about one of you seasoned webmaster / animal lovers create a "real time" stolen or lost dog ticker and corresponding site. I would think almost EVERY pet related website would want to display it. I would.
If someone decides to take on this project, sticky mail me sometime and let me know so that I may add the ticker to my site(s).

Have I gone off the deep end?.. or do others agree that this type of site and ticker could have great possibilities?

[mack]

Ideas like this are great but they must go in one of two possible directions. Localized where you will display a ticker for thre local area on community and personal/hobby sites. Or centralized where the data is pulled from a massive database. Going with a half way measure will IMO not work. To be honest I think the key is to stay local, that way the ticker is appearing on targeted sites. If it was to operate within a lareg area then is is going to be very diluted for any user because they will see listings from all over the large area.

Perhaps a ticker is not the way to go. A searchble database would perhaps work a lot better. If anyone looses a dig that can place the information online. And if anyone has lost a dog they can search the data online. It woudl be best to try and work with as many authorative organisations as possible so that the data can mount up. For example dog warden agencies might input data to the system.

It is a good idea, just though I would throw in a few of my own.

Mack.

[onedumbear]

I agree on a number of points there Mack. Especially about going halfway. There are SO many lost and stolen dog websites that are not done professionally that you could spend a day searching through all these sites trying to find your "lost" dog.
It would definately be better if it were a state by state thing also. I think the live ticker thing would have some good advantages though...one of the main ones being that it would make it obvious to all that it's a very up-to-date site and info system.

[mack]

I think the most logical way of doing it would be to add different tickers for different sites located within different states. So say you wish to add the ticker to your site, you would select your state from a drop down list then be presented with the html to include the ticker on your pages. On each ticker you could perhaps have the most recent additions to the basabase from within the specific state. Also perhaps a link direct to a search page where users could refine their search.

Mack.

[jamesa]

After losing (and eventually finding) a pet I decided to build a National lost pet database... will get it done, just got put on the back-burner temporarily. The ticker is a nice idea, though.

I actually brought in a real-life Pet Detective when I lost my cat (yes cat), but that's another story... :)

On a related note, Woz's new company Wheels of Zeus (? Something like that) is working on a animal tracking system. (Woz = Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple computer.) It's basically a dog-tag with GPS built in. Pretty cool. Don't think it's available yet.

[copongcopong]

It would be best to have picture of the dog, and some details like color, size, breed, location, etc ...

have it in RSS/XML format, and let other site have it as an advertisement.

this could be host by a site, database-driven and information of a lost dog (rss format) which sends the RSS randomly.

my 2 cents.