Sunday, February 13, 2011

Prototyping tool

Like Keynotopia, but ... in JS, using WWW::Publish specs internally, and with full file skeleton output.

Right-click JS on the elements of the screen to enter test data. How cool would that be? Drag and drop components, and boy howdy - Keynotopia has already got a neat list of components.

It would be so cool.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Categorized job ad aggregator

This should go onto sproggler, I guess...

Update: I should specify: categorized job ad aggregator that doesn't suck because there are plenty of the sucking kind.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Sailboat ad aggregator

Good domain (findasailboat.com) and it's something I need, anyway. How would one monetize that? Ads, anyway. Try to contact some sailboat sellers directly for ad placement, once there was a little traffic.

1. Find all the sailboat ad engines you can.
2. Write a scraper for each one.
3. Run the scraper periodically (say, daily).
4. Have various hit pages for the search engines, but provide an expert-level search.
5. A blog in conjunction, perhaps?

This would work for any vertical, really. There's probably a whole range of possible search topics that could be narrowed in this manner.
Just a start.

Update October 2012: the domain's still available.  Just a thought here - the reason this would be useful is that existing sailboat engines are either not sailboat-specific, or crap in terms of the underlying database, or both.  If you just want to look for sailboats online, you're kinda out of luck.

So this would be pretty cool, and as I say, it's more or less a replicable domain-specific model.  If it works for sailboats, it would work for antique bottles. Or ... you know, whatever.  Like Techspex, which Nick replicated out to multiple tool types.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Porn

OK, OK, I know - it's just that porn always pays.

As you know, Bob, there is a vast amount of free porn on the Internet, and a vast number of aggregator sites for it. With few exceptions, they're horrible trash in terms of usability; the idea is to be as cheap as possible and push as much Javascript down your throat as possible.

Porn for geeks could be different. Similarity metrics, RSS feeds, I dunno - but the main thing is, a usable tool. We all know geeks consume porn. Monetization by sending people to the pay sites is also pretty standard. The question is: how do you stand out? I don't know. But here's a marker, just because.