Dark patterns: the Machine Zone

Ever spent three hours before bed zoning through pictures on Facebook or one more funny post on Reddit?  Sure you have. That's the Machine Zone, and it's kind of a human failure mode.

Forum/Twitter/email intermediary service

There are lots of people out there in public life (bloggers, game developers, etc.) who simply don't want to deal with obscenity-laden death threats on a daily basis. It wouldn't be that difficult to set up an intermediary service that would permit filtration of this stuff, perhaps coupled with law-enforcement reporting for anything credible.

It wouldn't necessarily even need to be that expensive.

This could kind of hook into a generalized social-media interface that could coordinate multiple services.

Zero to revenue in five weeks

Some kind of exploration support tool would be neat. Here's a quick little vignette about how this approach to online services can work.

Outbox

A service to pick up your mail and digitize/handle it for you, charging $4.95 a month in select markets. That's surprisingly low to me, since they actually go to your place with a key and get your mail (urban apartments) - not every day, though.  Still impressive.

That's easily clonable for any local market. Eventually the PO Box providers will surely also add that.

Some business links

I was researching terminology for a translation and hit a couple of links. Infoentrepreneurs.com is apparently the Quebecois mirror of a UK topic database about small business concepts.  And then Wifcon.com is a set of articles about American federal procurement for contractors.

This kind of stuff - and probably the contents of any reasonable business course (wasn't there a reading list for a "virtual MBA" I saw a couple of years ago?) - are grist for the mill for a semantic model of small business, which is what I'm zeroing in on here.

Education startups

Wise words about education startups.

Content organization technique

Here's a good notion for writing long-form journalism: start with a stub article, then keep expanding it with additional sections, always back-linking to the longer story. FastCoLabs is trying this under the rubric of "slow live blogging", which is a pretty entertaining way of putting it.  And I like it.  There are a lot of things that just work better this way, like my 2008 botnet spam project for example.