one liner: in news aggregation sites, provide a voted request for for a certain topic
This one is simple, sometimes people are interested in certain things that no one wrote about, sometimes blog writers don't know what to write about. Make a way for readers to request information about a topic.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Ideas and Startups
Something just clicked for me today while reading posts about bootstrapping startups (starting from here), that startups are businesses and businesses are supposed to make money. Ideas are like ammunition. You need to execute the ideas to get value, where each one can provide you with a slice of the market. However, having more ammunition doesn't mean you win the war. These ideas are supposed to be like resources that a company has to go from one profitable business to another. This sounds blindingly obvious, but there has always been this misconception in the back of my mind that startups are there to prove whether an idea is good or not. This post is just a self-reminder that the business comes first, ideas have no value on their own.
[of course... we'll see about all this when I actually start my first startup]
[of course... we'll see about all this when I actually start my first startup]
Rated Reading Lists of Blog Posts
one liner: provide a web 2.0 reading list for websites
There are lots of news/recommendation sites out there: digg, reddit, hacker news, stumble upon, slashdot, fark not to mention all the copy cats in various languages and they all provide interesting new stories aggregated from around the web. One particular property of the links provided is that they are usually self-sufficient/self-contained -- each post has a particular point to make, and it's pretty short. These work well for many types of stories, such as current events, interesting stories, or opinions. However there are other types of information that do not fit into those categories. In particular are things that take a long time to learn, like programming, playing an instrument, controversial issues, which are way too complex to be explained through one blog post or webpage.
Taking a step back, to learn these things you can just grab a book (okay you technophiles can buy the ebook online), why learn about these things in blog posts? I think there are two reasons why I prefer learning about things online, rather than getting a book. One is attention span, mine's not that long. Blame it on the information overload or whatever, but I just can't sit down and finish a book unless every page is interesting. Blog posts are just the right size to keep a person interested in a subject long enough to finish reading through it, but not go overboard to cover stuff you don't care about. Second is "peer review," the whole idea of the web 2.0. Many many blogs are submitted to these sites every second, but only a few are rated by the community to be interesting enough for me to see them. Since blog posts are short and to the point, each idea is validated by the community. The filtered posts are what the community deems worth knowing.
However there are stuff that are too complex to learn in one post. Some things do have a learning curve, which are a bit frustrating to overcome with the web. If you do a google search, you will find all the information for a subject, but it will not be organized. Same with information from these aggregation sites. You can dig into the archives and read articles that may or may not be suitable for your level, but that would be too time consuming for the web.
What I would like to see is an organized list of stuff to read for these topics that span multiple posts. For example, if I want to learn how to make a website, I want to know html first, css, javascript, php/language of choice, sql, ajax, then a web framework. It doesn't make much sense to learn django if you don't know python, or sql, or html.
To build it, I would start with a news aggregator, and add a functionality for popular posts to be in the "hall of fame" or in web forums -- "stickied," then these post that are stickied that are good enough to represent a topic would be organized chronologically into the order in which they should be read in, this organization could also take other forms, such as a tree. Posts may be replaced by other posts, or even removed if they are outdated.
On the client side there needs to be a mechanism for the user to keep track of what the user has read so far, which subjects the user was interested in, and suggest the next entry to read. On a side note, this could be an independent feature for browsers -- marking a website as one to be read later.
The business plan for this idea would be advertisement on those organized lists. They should be the finest quality that the community behind the website has to offer, and would attract a significant amount of traffic from very specific people.
There are lots of news/recommendation sites out there: digg, reddit, hacker news, stumble upon, slashdot, fark not to mention all the copy cats in various languages and they all provide interesting new stories aggregated from around the web. One particular property of the links provided is that they are usually self-sufficient/self-contained -- each post has a particular point to make, and it's pretty short. These work well for many types of stories, such as current events, interesting stories, or opinions. However there are other types of information that do not fit into those categories. In particular are things that take a long time to learn, like programming, playing an instrument, controversial issues, which are way too complex to be explained through one blog post or webpage.
Taking a step back, to learn these things you can just grab a book (okay you technophiles can buy the ebook online), why learn about these things in blog posts? I think there are two reasons why I prefer learning about things online, rather than getting a book. One is attention span, mine's not that long. Blame it on the information overload or whatever, but I just can't sit down and finish a book unless every page is interesting. Blog posts are just the right size to keep a person interested in a subject long enough to finish reading through it, but not go overboard to cover stuff you don't care about. Second is "peer review," the whole idea of the web 2.0. Many many blogs are submitted to these sites every second, but only a few are rated by the community to be interesting enough for me to see them. Since blog posts are short and to the point, each idea is validated by the community. The filtered posts are what the community deems worth knowing.
However there are stuff that are too complex to learn in one post. Some things do have a learning curve, which are a bit frustrating to overcome with the web. If you do a google search, you will find all the information for a subject, but it will not be organized. Same with information from these aggregation sites. You can dig into the archives and read articles that may or may not be suitable for your level, but that would be too time consuming for the web.
What I would like to see is an organized list of stuff to read for these topics that span multiple posts. For example, if I want to learn how to make a website, I want to know html first, css, javascript, php/language of choice, sql, ajax, then a web framework. It doesn't make much sense to learn django if you don't know python, or sql, or html.
To build it, I would start with a news aggregator, and add a functionality for popular posts to be in the "hall of fame" or in web forums -- "stickied," then these post that are stickied that are good enough to represent a topic would be organized chronologically into the order in which they should be read in, this organization could also take other forms, such as a tree. Posts may be replaced by other posts, or even removed if they are outdated.
On the client side there needs to be a mechanism for the user to keep track of what the user has read so far, which subjects the user was interested in, and suggest the next entry to read. On a side note, this could be an independent feature for browsers -- marking a website as one to be read later.
The business plan for this idea would be advertisement on those organized lists. They should be the finest quality that the community behind the website has to offer, and would attract a significant amount of traffic from very specific people.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Crime reporting online
One Liner: offer a service to streamline the reporting of crimes online and also offer rewards for doing so.
Okay, even though I only use this blog to write down ideas, here's something personal: I live in Taiwan; and here's something political: the government sucks at managing the police. For those who have not visited an Asian country, you do not know the frustration at being stuck on the road because someone double parked on both sides of a narrow street, just because the driver didn't want to parallel park just a few meters away. Bad drivers, crazy motorists really drive me crazy, because they make it dangerous for so many other people to gain just a little bit of convenience for themselves.
But now that almost all cell phones have camera on them, and it is really easy to connect to websites, people should be able to report crimes easily. A streamlined service would accept pictures and other relevant information (speed, time, date, location) and try to automatically process the infraction (read the license plate) and send it to a police officer for review before sending the ticket. Reporters should be able to get a portion of the ticket as reward to encourage people reporting crimes. The tools that are used to report crimes should probably be certified for the obvious reasons, which the crime reporters would probably willingly pay as an investment for the reward money.
Chances are though, no matter how well it is thought out, this will probably not happen, since governments don't really try new things, and business that want to do this would need to jump through bureaucratic hoops.
Okay, even though I only use this blog to write down ideas, here's something personal: I live in Taiwan; and here's something political: the government sucks at managing the police. For those who have not visited an Asian country, you do not know the frustration at being stuck on the road because someone double parked on both sides of a narrow street, just because the driver didn't want to parallel park just a few meters away. Bad drivers, crazy motorists really drive me crazy, because they make it dangerous for so many other people to gain just a little bit of convenience for themselves.
But now that almost all cell phones have camera on them, and it is really easy to connect to websites, people should be able to report crimes easily. A streamlined service would accept pictures and other relevant information (speed, time, date, location) and try to automatically process the infraction (read the license plate) and send it to a police officer for review before sending the ticket. Reporters should be able to get a portion of the ticket as reward to encourage people reporting crimes. The tools that are used to report crimes should probably be certified for the obvious reasons, which the crime reporters would probably willingly pay as an investment for the reward money.
Chances are though, no matter how well it is thought out, this will probably not happen, since governments don't really try new things, and business that want to do this would need to jump through bureaucratic hoops.
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