Had to get an idea down before I passed out and forgot what I was thinking. I had a little free time today, just me and the pup over at Rodeo beach for the first time. It was good for the sanity I think. Anyway, whatya think about being able to invest in everything? Whatya think about a cross between kiva and yelp? I can’t afford to make real investments… say things over $100, or at least I think I cant. However I don’t think I would have any problem putting a little money here and there towards a local cafe I really want to succeed. Why do I have to put my money into big ass corporations I don’t trust and can’t really know anything about? I actually know the folks who own the produce market on the corner and I really trust the folks at the cheeseboard and arizmendi. I would give them my money in the form of a little loan or perhaps discounted prices.
I think if you mashed up Yelp or some other business directory with something with kiva functionality you could come up with some interesting results. I’m sure some small local businesses could use local loans that are just a grand or even less from a few folks.
I have an account. I add money to whatever businesses I want. They hear about this crazy site a month later… see they have $45 already to be granted to them. They sign up and agree to some sort of financial terms… be it actual interest or discounted goods. ??? I dunno. We’ll see, or not.
How many people just don’t bother with wall street, with investing their money because they hate all that it means. I don’t want what little money I have to be sitting with the next Enron or really with any other monster corporation I know so little about. Why can’t I invest my money with a bunch of the small businesses in my neighborhood?
That’s the crazy gist while I drink my scotch tonight.
Just build a stupid forum. A local forum for every town.
I guess in terms of business I have no idea what they should do. Maybe they have local coupon plans or something but I wish I could see a local news site from them. They obviously play a huge part in distributing and making news these days but I would like to see a better way to have neighbors communicate and obviously Facebook could easily do this. They are always looking to open up anyway and get people out in the public.
I would try not to piss too many people off by adding some new features to Facebook or changing privacy settings. Instead they should just create some entirely new url unrelated to fb and slap their forum on there. They should start with every county and every incorporated town within that county. Just places people vote. Facebook is the best way to register a user for these sites as anonymous users in public conversations can often be horrible contributors, lying and full of generalizations.
One of the most important parts of a forum is the ability to lurk. One of the most important parts of local new sites or blogs are the comments. Being able to lurk through comments and threads for just your town would be quite handy I think. There obviously are difficulties with spam with traditional forums but I’m sure FB could handle that by ensuring users are real according to number of friends or something. Also, I would do no importing content from facebook posts with gps coordinates in town or from other articles concerning said town. Just let the content be organic.
The thing to do would be to launch it all hush hush, as a personal project of one of they engineers or teams. Anyway, I’ll work a bit on Townpress.org. Goodnight!
So it has been a while since I’ve done anything online, played with any websites, got a blog going or anything. I’m not even sure I actually want to anymore but I kind of just feel obligated to do so at this point.
At one point I had a WPMU site going to to try and get some public sites or forums for towns in my area. I actually had figured out how to import hundreds or thousands of town names and populate the wordpress software with tons of place names, all so the site was ready to go in case I somehow got users from all over the map. I got rid of that site. But now I have another built on just Vanilla Forum software and I have all the towns in Alameda County set with sections of the site. Now there is a designated space on Townpress.org for Berkeley, Oakland, Emeryville, Hayward, and residents of all the other incorporated places in Alameda County to communicate.
I understand there are other places for neighbors or residents to gather online but perhaps a simple forum can still be handy for this purpose. Out of this weird obligation I feel I’ll be once again attempting to get some visitors to check it out and see if they can find a use for it.
You should check it out when they get some more machines up and running to handle the demand. I hope some bars or cafes start using it so patrons can determine what is being listened to. It allows multiple users to play dj in a specified “room” so if you make a “room” for your workplace and play it around the building coworkers can dj and choose what plays live. It makes easy something that lots people have probably struggled to do, multi-user playlists or itunes audio management over a network.
