Protecting idle software ideas
I think about technology a lot. Some would probably argue that I
do so too much, but I have a feeling this is a problem that is shared
by most of the people in our industry. Hell, if I didn't think
about technology as much, this blog would be even more boring then it
already is.
So of course if you think about technology alot, you have ideas.
Some good, some bad. Throughout the years I've had my share of
hairbrained ideas/apps that I thought would be the next big thing, that
I forget about 2 days later. I get very excited (inside) for a
few hours, think, think, and think some more, and then get sidetracked
which usually wipes out the idea. This happens alot, like a
few times a week.
Last spring I actually tried to help solve this issue by setting up an
"idea" portal. I invited a few friends, and for about 2 weeks there was
decent dialog about a few ideas. But much like before, it died,
rather quickly (and there are still viable ideas on there).
No matter how much I love the code, at the end of the day I code to
make money, as we all do, and I think thats why in the past I have
always tried to be secrative about ideas. Of course my next idea
is going to make me a million dollars. Well, I still don't have
my million dollars, but I do have a bunch of half baked ideas that
never came to fruition, and probably never will.
So I figure it might be time to blurt some of them out here to maybe
start a dialog in the community. Out of the hundreds, maybe
one will spark a conversation.
Finally, the idea that prompted this post.
I see alot of value in a bliki. I've posted about this before,
and would still love to be running on a blog package that was more of a
bliki. As I continued to think about it, though, a personal bliki
is nice for expanding on concepts to myself, but doesn't have the
community feel of a wiki. So the idea expanded a little.
My thoughts where to have a bliki, but that it's not really its own
package. This package could aggregate posts from a number of
blogs, and then render the text as being wiki minded. So take
DotText2DasBlog for example. Say there were other developers on
the project, and each of the developers already has a blog. We
could of course setup a blog, and a wiki for the project, and
everything would be happy go lucky.
Or, we could each setup a category on our own blog, and then tell the
"aggregating blog" to syndicate all of the posts that each of us put in
that category, thus giving us a unified view of all the blogs.
Then, when rendering the pages look for CamelCase words and render
links for the wiki. This would allow each of us to conitnue using
our own blogs, and seamlessly post to the aggregated blog. It's
kinda like crossposting, but with a pull methodology.
That concludes the first idea. Maybe I'll dig through the idea portal for another one later this week.