philcrissman.com

And, Some Ideas

Recently stumbled over a great post: Don’t Keep Your Idea A Secret.

I seem to remember reading some other similar things:

• NO ONE IS GOING TO STEAL YOUR BRILLIANT IDEA
• Your idea isn’t good enough to keep secret

It reminds me of a moderately famous quote (also seen in one of the above links):

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you will have to ram them down people’s throats.” -Howard Aiken

It sounds like good advice, to me. In the spirit of this, here’s what I’ve been percolating, incubating, and trying to throw some spare time at:

• A simple web-advertising application with a tiered membership, the first level of which would be free. The ads would appear as small text-based ads of the type that have become quite common. The interesting part of the idea is the free component; it would act basically as a sort of link-sharing system.

  It could incorporate a sort of popularity based ranking – add the times that a site’s ad is clicked, as well as the times that the links on their site are clicked; The better the score, the more likely it would be that your link would appear on other pages. Lest it become a tyranny of the popular, some forced rotation of all members could be put into place. Because the system would be reciprocal (someone who wanted their “free ad/link” displayed on another site would need to also include the ad script on their own site), there should always be enough sites to display all members ads multiple times throughout each day.

  I’d like to have one, or two levels above “free” that would allow more text, and/or a small image, and/or an additional number of guaranteed impressions per day.

  Has online advertising been done to death? Maybe. Despite my rant about advertising being a shaky business model for the future, I do think it’s a very solid model right now.

• An open membership, tree based blog. When I say “tree-based”, what I mean is that the entire structure of the blog would be based on a tree structure. The main site itself would be the root; each “user” would be a top level node, and each user’s post would be a child of their user node. A comment would be a child under each post.

  I’m already looking at the above description and seeing challenges. Also, there’s no particular reason this would be monetizable (unless you just started with subscriptions, like SixApart/Typepad) or any better than any other blog system. I want to build it anyways, because it just appeals to me.

  At the moment, I’m thinking it would be a micro-blog type format, but at the same time, I don’t see any reason to prohibit longer posts. I started a prototype of this in PHP, but I’d really like to develop it in Rails using acts_as_tree. Again, just because.

• This is a bigger one: I’d like to build a user-friendly, powerful, database front-end for the web. Think “phpmyadmin,” but with an Ajax-y UI that would (hopefully) make it comparable to Access or Filemaker Pro. I’d also want to include form creation and reporting features.

  In my mind, an app like this would literally make it possible to build blogs, databases, social networks, or whatever, all using this tool. There’s no reason you couldn’t allow people to map their own domain name to their app when it’s finished, much like SixApart and Blogger let users have their own domain names point to their hosted blogs.

  I’m really intrigued by this idea, and I really want to build it. I’d need help for this one. I know sites like DabbleDB already exist; that’s fine. To me, the fact that something similar exists only confirms that it’s a good idea.

• A Distributed Venture Capital Website. What if you could be the venture capitalist? I’m thinking something like Prosper, but more exclusively focused on startups than just loans. People would submit ideas, and users would decide whether to help fund them or not. I guess it could be a cross between Prosper and YCombinator, assuming you could get some VC-types to hang around and dispense wisdom to the funded.

  This is just a thought — I haven’t worked out whether this sort of site would even be possible, profitable, or legal. (Really; investing in risky ventures has some fussy rules, IIRC; I’d rather not have the SEC bothering me.) I still think it could be good idea; it just needs some research and some fine tuning.

That’s all I have, for now at least. Tell me what you like, what you hate. Leave your own ideas in the comments, or just link to them. Thanks!