Why?

Ads are relevant, but not catering to my specific interests.

Content-specific ads trigger only rational behaviors, while interest-specific ads evoke emotional behaviors. As a marketer, which kind of behavior do you think would be more likely to lead to an action?

When I search for something, it doesn’t mean I demand for that “thing”, or I am shopping for that “thing”. The motivation behind each search varies.

Sometimes, I just want to look up certain information for my proposal preparation, sometimes I ask search engines for information of gadgets I want to buy.

Targeted-ads appeared in the second scenario will be most welcome; on the other hand, in the first scenario, I would hate to see any ad that distracts me from my research, since I’m not in the mood of buying any service or product.

So how to improve relevancy?

1. An option to turn on or off poping-up of targeted-ads.
2. An option to input my specific interests, training an intelligent ads-server always returning limited topics of ads I assign.

For example, I’m a StarWars Toy collector, I feed the ads-delivery server on related keywords, ensuring that I “always” get StarWars related ads in return. No matter searching on youtube.com, google.com, or any ads-served blog, no matter what content I’m reading, seeing my favorite SW action figures showing up in the ad-column would absolutely makes me happy, and thus a happy buyer.

It’s a delivery model of “interests-customized ads”, which tailor to the “person” who makes the search, rather than the old-fashioned model that marries ads to content, but not you.

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Let’s temporarily forget about digg and techmeme. Articles that attract most people aren’t necessarily meaningful to you.

How about a web site where anyone can hire a web 2.0 savvy as their daily-reading consultant to sort out quality feeds catering to respective needs?

btw, check out this:

• AideRSS Means Quicker Feed Reading

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Wait wait wait, wait a second, have you ever heard of the line: “If you can’t defeat you enemy, then make fun out of them?” (of course you never, because I coined it 1 minute ago. )

So, today’s idea - A website where you can dump spams which you think creative/funny/weird/sucked/etc.

Sounds strange? How does it work? Simply put, whenever you “accidentally ” stumble upon a spam, no matter in your mailbox or on web pages, simply “bookmark” it on the proposed site. If you are in a good mood, you can give it a little description, such as where you step on the mine, or how sucked it is. If you are angry at this annoying spam, just tag it with “filthy” key words! However these words should be acceptable in blogosphere de facto, to show how angry you are at it while avioding issues like personal attacks.

Next to the tag line are two columns, thumbs-up and thumbs-down. In thumbs-up section, you score the spam from zero 1 to 10, and tell everyone what appeared on the spam make you lol. The jingle? Or the falling-down-bikini-model image? Similarly, in the thumbs-down section, you assign it with a score from -1 to -10, and tell others specifically what on the content make you sick.

Ok, now, anyone visiting the front page will see a spam-version of hot-or-not, which means you will be shown a series of snapshots of spam-pages bookmarked on the site. Before you go to the next spam, you can score the present one from -10 to +10, and if you want more info about it, click the “sucks me more” button, which will lead you to the detailed-info page made by the original submitter. You can also add your opinion/review by following the format accordingly.

By the way, a bonus feature - you can even “share” the most sh*tish spam you discover on the site to your friend (or rival)! Play prank on those you don’t like (or like)! i.e. Bosses

Finally, when the score of a certain spam reaches a threshold, say +1000 or -1000, the site will (manually, if no info of source provided) mail the result to the original company (probably to their marketing department, or even VP of marketing.) to show them what a great/lousy job they have done! Not bad, right? An anti-spammers-community suddenly transforms into a practical marketing research group, offering valuable feedbacks! What’s more, during the process of filtering “good” spams from “bad” ones, users have lots of fun, work off their angers, and generate value.

Oh, don’t forget the original submitters, when their shared spams reach the threshold, the marketing companies should thank and reward him/her.

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If you have some experience using apps like photoshop, you must know as long as you want to edit your current WIP(work-in-process) files in the future, you have to save them in the .psd format. .psd is the standard file format of photoshop. Pics of these “raw” formats can be edited easily and flexibly, since they consist of original layers of objects. After you convert them into .jpg/.png/.gif formats, they will be permanently compacted, and no longer editable.

Hey, if you are a professional artist, how about share your .pdf files and earn some money from them?

In this “open-anything” age, I would like to propose an open-graphic-design platform where designers can exchange/trade their editable graphic files.

A PsdTube? -> pricing(bidding)/uploading/sharing/online editing/downloading etc.

The same concept can apply to a marketplace of Flash’s .fla files.

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A job occupation called “game-testers” has been introduced to the game industry for decades, and I don’t think there shouldn’t be a category of job description called “beta-testers” for the Internet industry. Let’s see:

Pay per signup?

Pay per contribution? (i. e. $1 USD for every 10 videos uploaded/ $0.5 for every 10 comments on your shared article)

Pay per bug-reporting?

Pay per reviewing? (every review help your site gain more publicity, no matter it’s positive or negative)

And lots of possibilities goes on and on.

In short, Beta-testers not only debug your product but also generate basic (crucial) content if your startup is SNS-oriented.

So, here comes today’s startup idea (finally): Simply building a website to serve as a marketplace of beta-testers <-> entrepreneurs.

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Actually, it’s just a concept, not that you can start to delete some of my boring ideas here…

I read a post from Fred Wilson’s blog, in which he disagreed that Marc Andreessen turns off the all the comments on his fast-growing blog. Fred insisted that the spirit of blogging is two way communication, etc, etc.

So, blogs = the best way of communication? To what extent? When I went through these lines, I ask myself, is this possible to have a wiki-blogging platform? Wow, I’m challenging the extreme level of free speach on blogs. Here is how it works:

If the blogger applies this function, every reader can edit posts (or maybe just part of a post) the author allowed to be edited. Of course there should be a version-control mechanism. For example, if you think my last idea sucks, you can modify it. If you find a mistake of my understanding of Spock.com, you can correct it. If you want to supplement a picture, a digram, or even a video at the end of the post, do it! The bottom line? The blog owner still retain the full administrative privileges, that means whenever he/she finds the edition ” unacceptable”, he/she can do any recovery, or even turn off the wiki-option on this specific post.

Did I cross the line? I’m not sure. At least if I can find a wordpress plug-in of “wikibloging (not co-authors)”, I will experiment this concept here!

For A-list bloggers? Sorry you probably can’t afford to revision the distorted posts every 2 minutes, but Mr. Fred Wilson, since you are a blog-conversation advocate, you should give it a try anyway!

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And then I came up with an idea. Why don’t the team of spock add a feature, which shows the “most viewed” articles published by the one you’re searching for? For example, when I search “Tim O’Reilly”, Spock not only returns his profile, but also his most renowned “What Is Web 2.0” post, and so on.

I believe it would be useful because as the saying goes: You are what you write, right?

If the Spock team don’t want to do this, then you can give it a try. Build a vertical search engine of “popular posts” by crawling the authors’ names at the beginning or end of articles, counting the inbound/outbound links of them as well as the click-throughs, and finally ranking/aggregating these top posts to the indexed profiles respectively.

Sorry for being too simplified.

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Ok let’s go back. I dropped by a site, Bubble Guru, this morning. There, you can record a video clip, and then copy the widget code to your blog. It’s nice to have a greeting video to my dear readers in a couple of minutes!

My excitement didn’t end here.

I found a description of the site said “Update (video)messages as often as you wish.”

Hey, are you talking about Twitter-like-video-nagging?

Can you imagine a page of Twitter-ers’ big heads, their odd facial expressions, and their exagerated gusture in motion, combined with their noisy naggings (now the real sound of twittering)?

Crazy, but I’m looking forward to this sort of service, as long as my bandwidth won’t explode…

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What will you do? Save them on your bookmarklets? To be earnest I tried to do so, but I am so forgetful that the chance I go back check them is near zero. In addition, clicking on a huge number of posts links to see which one really interest me is a laborious work. (i.e. Seth Godin’s previous posts are great but not every post fit my flavor, thus I have to go throgh the titles to figure out those useful to me. Do you know have many posts there?! Nevertheless, I repeatedly tell myself that I should squeeze some time out to excavate his antique posts, but you know I never realize this dream. )

I will be thankful if someone out there program a service that can feed me old posts. For example, I can set a range of time or a category of posts, or just assign the very first post as the starting point, and I will receive 10 posts chronically everyday/week until it reaches the newest one. This way, I won’t have to give up too much attention from daily jobs to dig deep into the trivial yet instructional vintage articles. Not to mention I can have a slight pressure (like my parents when I was a kid) to urge me go through valuable posts. Hopefully to be a scheduled progress of self-learning programs.

Hoo..I spent a whole afternoon looking for a service/software like this, but couldn’t get one.

ps. Anyone knows when did Seth Godin start to write blog? The earliest one I can find is dated Jan 15, 2002. More than 2000 posts on his blog!? A nightmare to be conquered…

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Maybe invite singers to be vocals of the ads? An ad about their next concerts? About their newest album (or coming soon)? Who says audio ads can’t be contextual? I believe fans will love to hear ads all about(form) their beloved singers, and their endorsed products, especially if they are willing to sing some jingles .

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Maybe editors (or normal users) can try to organize entries into categories, or step-by-step learning programs. For example, if I search for the term “EPS(earning per share)”, the returns include entries (basic knowledges like what is gross profit, what is revenue, what is common stock issue, what is preferred stock issue, etc etc. ) I should check first that can help me understand EPS more easily. At the end of the article should be entries recommended to me that are also checked by other users after reading through this one. Or a “Chapter II” link leads me to the next stage of financial knowledge.

Will enthusiasts do this job voluntarily? I would like to hire a bunch of experts to compile this super textbook collection leveraging resources from Wikipedia. Of course only if I meet some crazy VCs .

Hacking Wikipedia? Wikipedia API? Perhaps no sooner we can find Wikipedia-branded online textbooks of Introduction to Accounting or Introduction to Economics!?

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So I would like to have a website where users submit stock analysts’ “quotes” or anything they said about the future stock market. Users can click their names (as tags) to see what they have boasted. If they are right (correct prediction), vote them up, and vice versa. I believe finally liars will be buried deep and true professionals will surface.

Show me some dark horses! (also dark-horses stocks:P) It would be boring to see the top list overlap this one.

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• Preview comments of posts. (a fastest way to preview comments of a post)
• IInviteYou.com -> I invite you (and only you) to do__ with me. (goal-oriented events, like a combination of evite+43things)
• A widget helps bloggers give away___ to their readers. (At least I know Om likes to do so periodically to thanks his faithful readers. How about a more systematic way to interact with your readers? In addition to expressing your gratitude, it can also be a promotion tool to attract readers.)
• Aggregate comments all around the Internet regarding the same topic. (Why comments so important? Read this.)
• Lend me___, my good friends.
• You make audio-book -> read aloud -> sound recording -> and finally convert the whole vlume or part of your own paper books into an audio-book format, then upload/share. (The platform/service provider signs deals with publishers and copyright holders to avoid controversies. Besides, user-generated audio-books can be sold and revenues can be shared by the audio-book creator, platform, and original copy right holder/publisher.)
• A page full of AdSenses (The million dollar homepage of AdSense?)
• Social shopping concept
• Promote your latest post @____ to your friends/contacts (IM, email signature section…)
• To make (filter) quality comments on YouTube videos.
• Borrow the Microsoft “IM” charity campaign concept.
• A marketplace for sponsors of college student events.
• Submit and digg make-up stories.
• Meebo’s Chatroom+TV concept (At last they find a way to revive the long forgetten mass chat room service.)

I may select some of them as the next wave ideas and come up with futher details.

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