Startup Founder's Workbook

Steve Blank has produced a startup founder's manual, with a companion workbook at Zoomstra, here. This workbook consists of a set of checklists with progress markers that would make a dandy first stab at Startup::Declarative.

Zoomstra

Another platform for monetizing content: Zoomstra.

Gabriel Weinberg's flowchart

Startup strategy - codified.

Another dark pattern: Sambreel

Nice strategy: plant browser-resident malware ("Drop Down Deals", etc.) that modifies each page the user sees, then zap the host's ads and show your own. [Atlantic]

CRM for the Web

Open data permits better management of the customer relationship.

Voting record tracker

This isn't so much a startup idea as a "something I could do" idea - given a list of proposed legislation, tag it with the purposes of each bill, then use http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes to track votes.  Do statistical analysis to cluster Congressmen on like voting (this is probably kinda boring given the Republican lockstep lately).

The reason: Paul Broun (Arkansas-R) says science is Satan's work ([e.g.]) - so how do we find his voting record on science-relevant legislation?

Update: Oh.  We look at votesmart.org, of course.

Research sites / searchable databases

Really, any area of interest can turn into a searchable database.  I should really be able to get this kind of stuff done in my sleep by now.  Specifically, I was thinking of DIY hardware - sourcing things like sensors and so on.

The basic process would be:

1. Get a basic semantic picture of the domain (i.e. what items are of interest? What attributes distinguish them? Who is active in the area? Who blogs about it?)
2. Crawl the Web by means of link following, search term identification, and so on.
3. Find the valuable data sources and determine the database schema that best encodes them.
4. Scrape data on a periodic basis into your database, and make sure you have keyword-rich databases available.
5. Provide some kind of commenting/forum functionality.

There are, of course, lots of this kind of thing out there - they all suck.  A small community of devoted fans can make or break this; you can become the definitive guide to a very small domain.  Monetize with ads and with sales.