MillionDollarIdea

LorraineLee is not particularly interested in the current trend in WikiWorld culture, the quest for the MillionDollarIdea. Her interest has always been more in subversive ideas than entrepreneurial ones. They're more fun and less hype.

  I would say it is an aspect rather than a trend.  I have 3 kids who have not finished college.  I sure would like to help them more.  I'd also like a vacation.  I don't particularly like dealing with money issues at all, but it can be fun too, and perhaps profitable.  I've put my heart and soul into XanthusInc for the last 5 years and overall it has been very frustrating.  We deliver great technology solutions at great prices and I do enjoy solving problems but we just can't seem to make a profit.  I want more fun AND more money.  Bear with us please...  And the idea of creating value such that everyone can GetRich is rather subversive I'd say in spite of the hype. Thankfully when we each specialize WE are greater.  -- JimScarver

    As an aspect of WikiWorld it is good, adds flavor.  I hope your kids find college to be everything they were hoping it to be.
  Thank, you.  Jeff quit school and joined the army cause money was so tight, he was back in school four years later but now the Colorado National Guard Reserve has called him back to duty so again his education is on hold.  But thanks to the GI Bill and his soon to be wife, he will finish eventually.  Greg wants to go back to school, only Michelle is in school now.  Amy got free tuition at NJIT cause I worked there and between scholarships and myself her room and board was paid.  James worked hard to make ends meet, thrived, and now teaches and makes music (ErinAndJames).

As children, we were taught to admire ideas, and the people who advanced them. They are the mark of personal brilliance, and for some have been a ticket to a place in history.

Then there's that special type of ideas called inventions. Inventors are the folk heros of American history, especially the ones who embody the AmericanDream of making lots of money.

The continuing appeal of "inventor" as everyone's dream career has spawned a mostly disreputable "inventor services industry". The web has been a breeding ground for largely the same business genres of other hard-sell arenas such as infomercials and NetworkMarketing, and not surprisingly has also spawned a revival of selling the dream of inventorhood.

A recent glance at RecentChanges on WikiWorld reveals that WikiWorld has caught the inventor bug. It's not what I| was hoping the wiki would evolve into, mainly because I find idea-themed (and opportunity-themed) websites to be a crowded and tired genre, in short, a cliché of the web.

This is by no means a suggestion not to do it. I suggest you do it, but be careful to tread where others have not. :) As for where others have trodden, I was a participant-observer of a seemingly complete life cycle of a website of the "idea genre". It calls itself the "brightidea community". [[|http://www.generalideasinc.com Their web site||http://www.brightidea.com/]] is still operational, but as an online community it is at best vestigial. Every few days or so someone posts something, almost always painfully unoriginal. |http://www.brightidea.com/showmemberideas.asp?page13&clippage&screennamen8chz&order&pid= has generally been a mixture of DevilsAdvocate, GuerrillaTheatre and miscellaneous html experimentation. Like many websites, it tried to address the mid-2000 bandwidth crunch by becoming jumping on the "get paid" site fad of that short-lived era. Maybe some of you recall names like Themestream, Writtenbyme, or the still-extant Epinions. The deal smells to me like the sort of piecework scam that is as old as the hills. It lead to a dramatic increase of traffic and decrease of SNR. The small core of people actually interested in brainstorming quickly lost interest. When the "business model" inevitably collapsed, they discontinued the "get paid" part of the deal, and the new hordes of participants left in anger. Now there is sporadic but uninspired participation. The software is still operational, so perhaps the WikiWorld community could "colonize" it. I don't see any point in doing so, though. Like most commercial websites, it has a seemingly deliberately informationally inefficient design. The PHP wiki software you've got right here is far more powerful for developing ideas through collaboration. As far as I can tell, brightidea is essentially a crippleware demo for something called "General Ideas Inc".

My advice to those who would like to create an "inventing committee" within WikiWorld would be to study brightidea.com...it doesn't expire articles, so its history is visible. That history provides a host of examples of what not to do, as well as [[|http://www.brightidea.com/obbucket.asp?bucketid310FC0CB-F1D9-11D3-9F87-00A0C932F0D2&topicTop/Brightidea some genuinely good ideas on idea aggregation]].

Some more lively idea sites are the less blatantly commercial ones...[[|http://www.halfbakery.com shouldexist||http://www.shouldexit.org]], halfbakery, etc.

You should know that PubWan [[|http://www.brightidea.com/obviewidea.asp?ideaid{CA337CF7-8040-11D4-9F8D-00A0C932F0D2}&bucketid originated in brightidea]]. For the record, PubWan was never intended to be a product.

Thanks for the cautions, Lorriane, and for the pointers to other idea sites.

No worries, LorraineLee. As long as there is a StarPilot bumming around here, there will be people more interested in pure ideas, concepts, the enjoyment of brainstorming, and discussion, rather then worrying about getting rich anytime soon. I've done the executive at successful firm bit, and I don't care for it. If I wanted to get rich quick, I'd have stayed in that life style. It's no fun and forces its participants to pay attention to all the sorts of things that I find the antithesis of fun and destroys my preferred life enrichments.---StarPilot

My prediction is China will become the worlds leading superpower faster than expected by the average person. Inexpencive labor, food, and resources. A free China will grow many times faster then any economy imaginable.

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