1. IdeaMode (1999)

After labeling PixelTycoon as "experiment #19" for fun, someone asked what the first 18 ideas were. Well, have there really been 19? I'm not sure, lets get started.

After leaving a contract position at Microsoft in the spring of 1999, I wanted to teach myself more ASP. Inspired by a friend's success with an online community centered around bowling balls, I developed a Web site for sharing recipes and crafts.

I had a Web designer friend draw some wonderful icons and pick a color scheme. I coded the whole thing in probably about 3 weeks. I then emailed all my friends and twisted their arms to enter in a few tips. At its height, ideamode had about 40-60 wonderful recipes and tips for things like pie, buritos, and home decorating.

However, ideamode was to be my first hard lesson in creating community on the Web. After my friends had shared their tips, there was no way for others to discover the site, and not enough content to cause my friends to refer their friends... and so it sort of languished inactive. I meekly posted in forums, and emailed crafty people directly trying to get them to contribute. But as I now know, you can't build a community from a tool, you have to build tools for a community.

Today, ideamode is someone else's "Information Architecture & Design (IAD) company" in other words, not my Recipes.com.

I'm going to find that old Access database, email my friends with their recipes, and maybe make a pie.

Social Shopping

I have been wanting to take what I have learned from Lookmarks, and create a "social shopping" site for some time now. Here is a list of the potential competitors I have discovered. Of them, I think StyleHive.com, Kaboodle.com, and Nabbr.com are my three favorites.

Web App for Conflict Resolution and Decisions

A couple times in my life, I have made difficult life decisions using a spread sheet. Of course, I've also used this technique while working to help a group come to a consensus. The spreadsheet typically lists a series of criteria with a numeric weighting, and a score for each option. Total up the scores times the weightings and voila, you have your answer.

This would be a fun Web app to build, so that Excel wouldn't be a prerequisite for ending personal paralysis. It would be a great collaborative app, so that a community could reach consensus, or contribute criteria, or arguments for and against each option. Decidr.com is taken, any other ideas?

2007 Tour de France in London

I did not realize this was in the realm of possibility:

It will be a unique experience and the first time that the greatest cycle race in the world has visited the Capital. Over three days the start of the race, known as the Grand Départ will include the Opening Ceremony, the Prologue race day in central London and then Stage 1, which begins in London and finishes in Canterbury. - from here

An alternative Approach to Tagging

This is an interesting idea for implying a hierarchy to a set of tags based on the order:

An alternative Approach to Tagging - ThinkPHP /dev/blog: "Instant Hierarchy
A method that combines the flexibility of tagging with the search-narrowing power of a deep hierarchy is to combine the tags to an 'instant hierarchy': The user chooses from a pool of keywords. Like in tag clouds, he gets to see some items then and a list of subsequient keywords. He can then choose a second keyword and get the items that are tagged with both chosen keywords, and so on. This instant tree is at it's deepest in the path of the item with the most tags. "

Buying Bookmarks

Jason Calacanis will hire active users on Digg and Delicious to seed Netscape's community news site with content:

I have an offer to the top 50 users on any of the major social news/bookmarking sites: We will pay you $1,000 a month for your "social bookmarking" rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we'll give you $12,000 a year. (note: most of these folks put in 250-400 stories a month, so that 150 baseline is just that--a baseline). - Calacanis.com (via Paul Colligan)

This is significant because it reinforces that contributors deserve a reward for their work. I read somewhere that Google has search pruning experts - paid staff to review the quality of Google's search results. Makes sense to me. Of course, if you can't make the cut for Calacanis' top 50, why not become a HelpShare affiliate, and start answering questions for visitors to your site!

Are you unique?

Here is the first idea I posted to Cambrian House it should show up in the "IdeaWarz" section in the next day or so. Click here to support my idea: .

This is an idea for a dating and personal networking site. When you visit you are greeted by a series of questions, such as "Are you male or female?" "Do you like rock or R&B?". You keep answering questions until your profile is unique (your combination of answers is different from everyone else's). At that point you enter your email and save your profile.

When someone else visits the site and answers a series of questions in the same way you have, you are sent an email. You are prompted to return to the site and enter a new question (and answer) that will restore your uniqueness.

At any point while answering questions you may browse people that have a similar or opposite profile to your own. Advertisers may inject questions like - "Do you like Coke or Pepsi?" They may also target ads based on your profile.

I was inspired by this idea by using sites like 43things.com and standpoint.com. These sites make it easy to create a personal profile by clicking links and voting "I want to do this" or "I believe this".

Cambrian House

I spotted these guys via an ad on TechCrunch:

We all have great ideas. What we lack is a vehicle to realize them. That's why we created Cambrian House.We can help you build your Web-based and desktop product ideas that can be sold over the Internet.

Each project starts with 1500 Royalty Points. Up to 150 points are allotted to the inventor of the idea, and the remaining points are allocated to development tasks for the product. These tasks will be given different point values depending on their complexity. Inventors are welcome to contribute work on the product themselves, increasing their share of Royalty Points. - Cambrian House

Nouveau Niche

I found a couple of thought provoking blogs tonight, springwise - "your daily fix of entrepreneurial ideas", and TrendWatching - "Global consumer trends, ideas and insights". Here is an excerpt from TrendWatching.

1. Consumers are more individualized than ever, expecting every good, service and experience to be addressing their unique and oh so important selves.

2. The combination of online transparency of supply, prices, recommendations and opinions AND near one billion online users enables a match-making game connecting insanely segmented supply with equally fragmented NOUVEAU NICHE demand.

3. New production processes, mass (!) distribution, technologies and communication channels, all enabling global economies of scale and scope, allow for virtually everything to be made and broadcast, at whatever specification, and whatever batch size.

4. New producers, including the millions of members of GENERATION C, are adding niche content in text, audio, video by the tera bytes, to be purchased by micro audiences.

- TrendWatching.com

Barcodepedia

I wrote something very similar to this in 2000 when the CueCat came out - and called it "TerraList". Unfortunately it was hosted in my closet, and I never re-launched it after I moved to London.

"Barcodepedia is a community-based online barcode database, where everybody can contribute whichever barcodes they have lying around on their crowded desks simply by holding it in front of your webcam. The database is completely free to use, and everyone is invited to participate. The site should be available in French, Russian, German and Swedish within a week, so get all your friends and go to your local store with a laptop for massive fun. Donations of cuecats and other specialized scanners are welcomed." - Slashdot, Thor Larholm

Steve Rubel at Gnomedex 30 June 2006

Here are some thinking points from Steve Rubel's talk at Gnomedex.

1. The World is Flat
2. Marketers get listening - but how does it become a conversation?
1. When contacting blogger - read blog first
2. Supply product images
3. Provide Permalinks to products
4. Marketing must show personality, a "human voice"
   
5. Put up a Wiki
3. Seth Godin - Advertising is Broken (for bad products)
4. People are passionate about everything (even toilet paper)
5. Ads are always getting in the way
6. Character blogs don't build relationships
   
   

More Gnomedex Acquaintances

• Brian Sullivan is a compelling character who is thinking about social change in the right way. He is building a tool called CivicEvolution to empower groups of real people and create change from the bottom up.
  
• Michael Kaltschnee of HackingNetflix has some great stories from a long successful career in the software (and plain ol' clip-art) business. I got to sit in on him giving the next guy in this list some life lessons.
• Blake Ross, altruistic lead developer for the Firefox Web browser (which I highly recommend and am using as I write this) first used the internet when he was 7. Unlike some of us old fogies who didn't see it until they were 18.
• Matt Mullenweg, another open source wiz kid - creator of WordPress (which I have installed and used) saw one of our music kiosks in accidental admin mode in Austin.
• I finally got a chance to talk to Robert Scoble. It seems that guy is always surrounded with fans. Rightly so, I love his blog. I asked him if his house had sold (it hadn't yet), and talked about podcasting on the bus.
  

Dave Dederer at Gnomedex 30 June 2006

Dave Dederer of The Presidents of the United States of America spoke about business models in music and the online music business. Here are a few bullet points.

• Artists themselves are able to capitalize on the long tail, if they retain ownership
• Eventful is innovating
• Small independent record shops (such as Easy Street and Sonic Boom here in Seattle) can survive when they provide an editorial function (ie are a good source of music recommendation and facilitate music discovery)
• Online music is at 1% of its potential, and makes up half of the President's revenue.
• Everyone is a store
  

Michael Arrington at Gnomedex 30 June 2006

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch led a discussion about Web 2.0, and whether the rift of new companies will succeed. Here are a few bullet points I jotted down.

• We're not in an echo chamber
• Many new businesses will reach the mainstream
• 9 out of 10 will fail, and few are genuinely innovative
  
• Is advertising a sufficient business model (yes, it is growing, only a fraction of advertising spending is online so far)
  
• Net Neutrality could cripple innovation
• The network effect makes sites successful
• There can be plenty of successful microbusineses
  

Gnomedex Acquaintances

Here is a sampling of the interesting people I met at this past weekend's Gnomedex.

• Aidan Henry: SEO expert and marketing specialist for PiXPO
• Myk O'Leary: works for Seattle based purenetworks.com
• Stuart Maxwell: actor turned podcaster
• Michael Buckbee: SecondLife consultant. Any ideas on how we can create a presence for HelpShare into second life?
• Gerelee Goltsev and Hobie Swan from mind-mapping software company MindJet. Thanks for taking notes Gerelee!
• Christopher Tse, a developer working on file sharing software
• Ricardo Rabago: a local podcaster focused on organic lifestyles
• Ashish Kumar and Gaurav Bhatnagar from tekritisoftware.com, developers of Marc Canter's PeopleAggregator. They traveled from Delhi for the event
• Todd Blanchard- This Amazon developer, who I had met previously arrived on his own sail boat from Bainbridge
• Chris Heuer of BrainJams sponsors events where experts are available for 15 minute paid sessions. The profits are donated to charity. This sounded like a real world HelpShare meetup.
• Phillip Pearson Broadband Mechanics was visiting all the way from New Zealand. Hopefully we can keep in touch about the question and answer micro format I want to develop.
• Kip Kniskern, a Windows Live blogger that attended my high school (albeit a bit earlier).
• Brian Fioca - Sold his ajax resume posting Web site to Jobster, and moved to Seattle from Anchorage