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.

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”.

You’re at work and you’re trying to locate someone. They’re not at their desk and you’ve asked the cubicle next to them to no avail.  What do you do?I bet if you did some traffic analysis (fancy term for snooping on people by pointing cameras around the office and hitting record) you could probably identify each person’s 1 or 2 most common routes through the office. That might be the path to and from the bathroom or maybe to the designated smoke area.  It could also be the path to the elevator as they sneak off to starbucks every ten minutes to get their fix.  Regardless of the why, you might be able to say with some degree of certainty, that if they are not at their desk, the next best place to find them is somewhere along that pathway.Now, if you actually went so far as to paint everyone’s pathways on the floor of the office, in addition to it looking funny, would it lead to a change in people’s behaviors? Would people change that route because they don’t want to feel predictable? Would they take a different route if they didn’t want to be found?