outsource glossary. provide the text for pop-up glossary terms for
websites. they can brand. include text ads? upsell for branding? no ads?
users can provide feedback and hone blurbs…
faq too?
turn the stock performance graph into a soundwave that someone can listen
to… for accessibility for the blind… also to allow people to tell a
good stock by it’s sound… “that sounds like a winner!”
This one brings the “real” world in line with the “virtual” one. We’ve all seen those “scenic vista” and “photo opportunity” type signs at national parks, theme parks, zoos, etc. They try to highlight just the right place for a little excitement to capture on film (or pixels).
Listening to a discussion today about moblogging and GPS-enabled camera phones, one would think the idea of placing little markers at (random?) places around the world, connected to GPS-enabled camera phones, or keyword-tagged photos on a site like flickr, could allow one to see unique perspectives captured by an array of people all from those same spots.
A shared view of that one small place in the world.
With almost any idea, I am positive this is already being done or persued somewhere on the web.
One day I came up with this idea to define how I’ve approached the business world these so many years: Low-Impact Entrepreneur.
It could mean a lot of different things, but the concept behind it for me is that with the web, one can dip one’s foot into the waters of some new venture or technology without having to go to deep. You can try a website, try a service, try a little bit of code and see how well it works, see if anyone finds it, see if anyone happens to find it worthwhile enough to spend money on it and go from there.
Should it draw some response you do a little more, recrafting the concept, expanding the service, increasing your involvement. If it takes off, you get more and more entangled. If it doesn’t, no skin off your back.
So, for example, if you set up a site and think “oh, i’ll charge for monthly memberships to get access to a wealth of new information they’ll pay to get” you’ve just now tied yourself down to a lot of responsibilities - regardless of how many people ever pay. You have to build/manage a system which rebills monthly (including handling rebills, charge backs, confused customers, etc.), you need to provide new content every month, and probably much more. If only one person joins, you still offered to provide them all of that - not much fun, right?
In my case, I chose to provide a “membership” type service but instead of possibly gaining more revenue from billing people again every month or year, I chose to bill once - good for as long as the site is around. What did I save? Well, I never build a complex rebilling system. I spend absolutely no time trying to find out if the guy has changed his email, didn’t know it was going to rebill and now wants a refund, etc. Low-impact. They get their immediate rewards and a good chance of long term gains. I get the freedom to forget it and walk away if that’s what makes sense.
This one should be a business… one that offers a web service/software app which is all about the opposite of “remind me.”
So the nagme system would allow you to enter websites, search terms, time amounts, times of day, etc. which trigger the system to hit you with a pop-up or warning asking “are you SURE you want to be doing this?”, giving you a chance to stop short of a behavior you’re trying to change.
Whether it’s surfing to those meaningless websites, searching for random wastes of time, or spending 5 hours sorting through your junk mail folder - however you waste time, you can have the system remind you periodically that you asked yourself not to do that anymore.
Sort of anti-del.icio.us
Re-enactments/Re-countings of things you remember happening (whether or not they actually happened). In effect, it would be the solidification of a possible life experience through the intentional recreation of supposed memories of said events.
Possible tag lines: “An Alternative to History” or “How (I Think) Things Were”.
Sitting through a web conference hyping Web 2.0 and web communities, I realize (yet again) how much I am not that demographic. I have rarely ever chatted, posted to newsgroups, hung out on blogs, etc. So, with the proliferation of MySpace, Facebook and Friendster, why isn’t there a Shutitster which would be a (parody) social network for people who don’t want to be in social network. Similar to some of the pages in those other social networks, the pages/profiles would be a wasteland of empty, default information, outdated items, etc.
The big pitch of the site would of course be the tally of how many millions of people felt compelled by the hype to visit, signed on, created as little of a profile as was required, looked around to decide it wasn’t worth their time, and never returned.
It could have “don’t bug me” buttons, forums/blogs with topics like “coming soon” and “welcome to your blog”.
There are a lot of sites that have tackled the “to do” list niche. Not sure if any of them is going into territories such as:
Taking these factors into consideration could allow for Gantt chart style output that helps see when to do items can actually be done.
