Something I had forgotten: exposure to the ideas of others is the best way to get new ideas of your own.
I spent a good part of the previous week at the Open Knowledge Festival. During the week, I spent two sleepless nights pondering on two ideas I got and grew fond of. This is a luxury to me these days.
A luxury, indeed. When I noticed that this is something I don't experience often anymore, I was struck by a sudden realization. I realized how much I need inspiration to get new ideas.
Inspiration often comes from meta-ideas. Around the time when we started out with Scoopinion, and had just read a very influential and funny book called by .
The book is a kind of a parody of business self help books, but it also has a point: if you have the courage to try out ideas that others don't try because they seem dangerous, you are probably onto something novel.
The original Scoopinion concept more than a year ago was a shared internet browsing history. It's a really dangerous idea, ridden with privacy concerns. With the original idea, we had a "social reader" months before Facebook did. We also realized that the idea was not only dangerous but also unfeasible, and we dropped the idea just before Facebook launched their version (which is not doing that well).
Nowadays we use the same dangerous technology to follow reading behavior, but we do the whole thing a lot better. Make tracking anonymous, and a social reader turns into a crowdcuration platform.
I doubt that we would have had the courage to do something as outrageous as reading behavior tracking had we not read the book first. Remember, this was a time before the social readers and such. All in all, I believe this kind of technology is required to help journalism to get back on track.
So thanks, Alf.
In the beginning I mentioned that I realized how much I need inspiration. To me, ideas don't come out of the blue. I need to expose myself to others' ideas, art or research to get some of my own.
No, that is not true.
My ideas are not my ideas. They are mashups; mixtapes. All of these ideas are our ideas.