Doodling, Memory and Capturing that Flash of Inspiration

Today was a very active day for my brain. While I didn’t solve world hunger I do think I had some pretty nifty ideas. One of the ideas that I had, for the life of me I can’t remember now, but what I do remember is a feeling of excitement and thinking it warranted further investigation. Gone now, no further investigation possible – I guess you get that. The idea must not have been very good if I can’t remember it now – that’s what they say anyway.

I decided today I don’t agree with them. I want a way that I can effectively capture ideas that come in that flash and are gone when more pressing issues arise…

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Beefing Up Self-Hosted WordPress with Google AppEngine

Well it’s 2010, and I definitely had a distractable end to 2009 (with a distinct lack of blogging). So to kick off 2010, I thought I’d start trying to get a few of the “low hanging fruit” ideas that I’ve had over the last six months written and working.

The first of those will be an experiment using Google’s AppEngine as a front-end proxy to a less robust website, hosted on low-cost hosting. Whilst not sure, I’ve got a feeling that I’ll be able to give my self-hosted wordpress blog a layer of resilience with some app-engine mem-caching goodness.

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Inline and Contextual Comments

It’s been a couple of weeks now since we got our first looks at Google Wave, and the dust is starting to settle. In the process of the dust settling for me, I really started question why we aren’t already actively using a key component of Google Wave on the web. The component I am referring to is being able to comment inline (or contextually) on web content such as blog articles.

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The OpenHub and Coworking

I was surfing around the blogs of some Australian consultants recently and came across The OpenHub in Melbourne. This is a coworking environment in Melbourne which sounds like a really great place to be if you are an independent developer or consultant.

The coworking movement looks really interesting to me – eventually I hope to go out on my own and create a successful startup, and what better place to spend the infant years of your startup that doing that with like-minded individuals. It just makes sense. I mean most of my ideas come to me when I am driving home from a day of work, so whilst at the time the ideas is formulating I am on my own, the idea is generally related to a conversation I have had with someone that day.

So, therefore, if I went out on my own and worked from home then firstly I wouldn’t be driving anywhere (and thus get my thinking time) and secondly, I wouldn’t be mixing with people from different backgrounds and experiences. Thus I could potentially get stuck in a rut… coworking seems like a great way to combat that. Not only that, but it’s an effective way to set up shop somewhere without the massive initial overheads.

VoteFlow – A Twitter Friendly Workflow Alternative

There are two things that are true at the moment (among all of the other truisms of the world):

1. Twitter is gaining mass appeal and is going mainstream.
2. Corporates are either looking to use or are already using twitter as a method of communicating with their customers

Which leaves me with a single question:
How are they managing the quality of their communication via this channel?

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Concept Buzz – Generate Concept Interest

Background and Motivation
I find taking an idea and turning into something real can be quite a challenge. This isn’t because I struggle to technically execute the vision, but more because I require some external motivation to see an idea through to fruition (otherwise I’ll probably just come up with some other concept and divert my attention to that). In most cases, this external motivation comes through a number of others showing genuine interest in the idea or by finding an external party who will behave like a client for the project – setting deadlines, mandating requirements, etc, to help things move along.

Part of my vision for the conceptual advantage site is to use it as a mechanism to push out some of my ideas for critique on the global stage. Some might think this seems like a ludicrous concept – why would you share an idea that someone else could potentially deliver on and make themselves a lot of money with? Well for one, I know that without some of the external motivators I require, I will probably never deliver a single one of my ideas. Secondly I feel confident that I have enough ideas (be they good or bad) that I could afford for a couple to be delivered by others if that means I deliver on some of those myself.

The Concept – A website for gauging concept interest
So how do I plan on generating some of this external motivation and enthusiasm to get things done? For now this blog serves as a mechanism for that, but based on my own experience it takes more commitment from a visitor to leave a comment than it would to simply give a thumbs up or down to an idea.

So what next? At this stage the plan is to set up a website that enables someone to register and submit a concept to be evaluated by visitors to that site. Additionally, I envisage using social bookmarking style bookmarking buttons to both communicate and gather interest for the concept – for instance, if the site was up and running this article would have a little widget in the top right corner saying “18 buzz – get on board” (or something similar).

Additionally, rather than force a potential fan of the concept to register on the site also (really I don’t want to force people to register with sites more than they have to) – I would probably explore using existing social bookmarking sites to assist with aggregating buzz for a concept. For instance, I can envisage a number of urls being associated with a particular concept: an initial blog post, a project site, the conceptbuzz.net site page itself, etc, etc and the amount of buzz for that concept should be the aggregate number of social bookmarking links for any of those urls.

So what would all that buzz mean then? Well for myself, I would commit myself to a concept relative to the amount of buzz. For instance, I see a concept moving through a number of phases before it’s released as a finished product. Lets say it goes from concept > prototype > public beta > release. In that case, I would set myself some “buzz thresholds” to inspire me to move it to further phases. In the case of idea A, I might determine that 100 buzz is sufficient for me to build a prototype of the idea, but for idea B I would want to see 2000 buzz before embarking on building a prototype given the complexity of the idea.

In closing, while I think the conceptbuzz.net site idea represents some risk around exposing your concept before having something in the market and competing, I believe this can be a measured risk for someone like myself. Let me know what you think. If you think it’s a good idea and something you’d like to see then use some of the key principles that I will implement (commenting, social bookmarking, etc) and get me motivated to deliver something! Additionally, let me say I welcome critical feedback too – happy to have someone shoot holes in the idea or throw questions in the mix that will cause us all to think.

Updates:
2009-03-23:
Modified conceptbuzz.net to www.conceptbuzz.net as I’ve started using Google AppEngine for hosting.