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Historical Wiki

Oct 15, ’09 9:42 PM

I think that I speak for nearly everyone in the world who’s been on the internet that Wikipedia is an amazingly useful website. Just blows my mind the ways I use it and to think of what I had to do to find the same information before it came around.

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.

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Take Picture Here

Sep 13, ’06 9:18 PM

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.

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Low-Impact Entrepreneur

Sep 13, ’06 9:07 PM

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.

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Documemory

Sep 13, ’06 9:01 PM

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”.

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Path of Least Resistance

Dec 15, ’05 11:54 PM

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?

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