While that alone would be useful (to me), how about taking it a step further. Why not expose Pandora-like functionality where I enter a book I read/liked/was told to read and it would show me similar books. This list might be used for additional readings or perhaps readings which would be more appropriate.

How would that work? Well, say you’ve just read a Malcom Gladwell book and you want to read more on the subject, it might recommend you read Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer whom Gladwell drew from.

Or vice versa, suppose someone recommends you read about motivation and drive – they just read Drive by Daniel H. Pink, but it seems a little too difficult for reading on the beach (or bus), wouldn’t it be nice to know that reading Linchpin by Seth Godin might give you some of the same takeaways?

Or I guess in my case, when I have a stack of unread books on my nightstand and a megabyte (what’s the equivalent new term?) of ebooks on my Kindle, how do I know which to read next? I might not want to read two books that are very similar back to back, or I might want to read something lighter after plowing through a scientific treatise.

Who’s going to build it?

Now, I might be an exception, but in how I learn and what I look to get out of a class, the bulk comes straight from reading everything in the course reader. While there are many classes I would not want to enroll in and sit through, there are many courses I would like to borrow/buy the course readers for.

But why be limited to classes here at the GSB or even Stanford, what if it was possible to get the course readers for any class in the world? That would be much more valuable to me than MIT putting all their classes online.

But why be limited to existing courses by existing “teachers”? Why couldn’t this be a new framework/structure for anyone to capture and advocate something people would want to learn. Build a course reader full of bits of your writings and those of others that lead people through a series of points you feel are valuable.

Just a thought.

For example, it must know by now that at 1 o’clock each weekday afternoon, I either turn it to silent or check to make sure it is so. This is because I have class and a ringing device costs you $5. Couldn’t it watch my pattern for a week or two and then project that I will do today what I’ve done every Tuesday beforehand?

Or how about the feature Apple offers where you can go through .me and find your phone if it is lost. Why do YOU have to go do that? Doesn’t your phone have a pretty good idea when it’s lost? Let’s say I have the phone in my pocket every day I go out the door. Every day. Since forever. Might the fact that tomorrow, the phone is still sitting where it was left, unmoved for 36 hours straight give it the sense to know something is up? Might it not “call” my designated contact, or email someone to say “hey, where are you? Do you know where I am?”

How about security? We put so much into these phones, with the banking apps, passwords, etc. Aren’t we worried if someone gets there hands on our phone? Sure, but what can we do about it? Well, the phone should be pretty good about identifying its owner, no? We use it every day, and though we might not see it, we have some very subtle patterns of usage and behavior that can’t be duplicated that easily. Can’t the phone identify and track this, such that when someone else tries to use the phone, using it in an entirely different way, that it thinks that something might be amiss and emails for confirmation: “Hey Matte, am I still in your pocket? Should I really be letting you into your online bank account or let you post to Wordpress?”

It might be weird to wake up one day to HAL in our pockets, but I think a device we encourage to be self-aware will do us less harm than a really smart device we continually expect to play dumb.

But what about all of the startups and brands that couldn’t afford the money? What about a range of products and services that wouldn’t necessarily appeal to the entire super bowl audience?

So my idea was for a raft of companies to band together and buy commercial time and have an ad advertising the groups’ site. Once on that site, each of the companies could feature their ads.

One could amplify the number of companies and their creative that could reach the audience.

Now, would all those ads be funny? Who knows. A risk of the model.

But while wikipedia is a great site for THE information on a topic at this very moment, what about the historical record?

Many times I’ve wanted to “go back in time” and get a perspective on something at a certain moment in time. What would the wiki page for the band Duran Duran have been in 1987? Where would I find discussion on the “latest” add by Pepsi in 1992?

We all know it’s easier to look back at what happened with rose colored glasses and think that’s really how it was. But it wasn’t. Things were different at every moment in time. Those moments are being written over every time someone updates a wiki entry to make it “up to date.”

So the idea would be to have an entire wiki for each year going back in time. People could write entries on places, people, events, products that existed at that moment in time. One could only reference that moment as “the present” and could also talk of anything previous, but the future was just the future.

Would a wiki for every year be enough? Need one for every month?

Of course, there would be a lot of extrapolating to fill in the historicalwiki record, but there’s a lot of data out there from the past that’s floating around, uncategorized. Libraries have archives with first hand materials from various ages. Companies have archives full of product advertisements from all points in the distant past.

This would be the perfect framework to catalog that past, as well as keep a running tab on the future of presents and pasts still to come.

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.

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.

Possible tag lines: “An Alternative to History” or “How (I Think) Things Were”.