Happy new year. I've started thinking about Lisp projects I could work on this year, since I feel like I didn't do enough real Lisp hacking in 2010.
I'd like to write a distributed backup system in Clojure. It's a simple idea: create a distributed filesystem using the free hard drive space in people's PCs. If you backup 100GB of data, it will be replicated in two other places within this "cloud", but you must contribute 200GB of your free hard drive space to the cloud in return. Hence you get geographic redundancy for your backups while providing space for other people's backups. I believe that this system could be created entirely as a P2P app, without needing any centralized component. The slightly tricky part is to ensure fairness; i.e. that people give roughly as much as they receive.
I'd like to write this in Clojure as I like the language, and being on the JVM makes it easy for the client app to run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This project "scratches my own itch", as I've always disliked setting up and maintaining backups in multiple locations for my own data. People have thought of similar ideas before, for example: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/18-842-nwalia/ ... but I don't see that any such service has become popular.
What would folks like to use Lisp for in 2011?