Tag: ideas

A café for work

I had an idea the other day that I wanted to share here. Maybe it already exists, in which case great! If not I think it could be a pretty successful service.

The idea is a service that rates coffee shops and lunch spots not on their food like Yelp and others, but on their suitability for people who work from home, or college students who want to get out of the library and study. Basically, a way of rating and indexing locations for work.

As social services expand on the web I think those that address a specific problem or community will be particularly interesting. This would be one type of service like that.

Instead of rating and indexing places based on their service, selection, or food this would rate them on factors like:

  • availability of power outlets
  • strength and speed of wi-fi
  • the community of customers1
  • view of staff toward you being there for a few hours2

In other words, it’d be a place where I could immediately see the best spots around me to get of the house and go work. It’d be a great method of breaking out of the cabin fever that can happen when you work from home all the time.

If I’m overlooking an existing service that does all this please do let me know as I’d love for something like this to exist.

  1. In other words, who else works here? What type of people would I be joining to get my work done?
  2. No one wants to work somewhere where they feel like they’re imposing or expected to keep buying more and more to justify their time.

Reading isn’t just viewing content in reverse chronological order

Reading isn’t just viewing content in reverse chronological order.

Daniel Bachhuber – Status.

Status

Minor feature request for Rdio: I want to be able to add albums to my queue through the mobile app.

I find lots of stuff while on the go that I don’t want to add to my collection but also don’t want to forget.

Replacing CoveritLive with P2

Two days ago Demand Media acquired CoveritLive. This made some understandably bummed and concerned for the future of the tool.

We never used CoveritLive while I was at The Pioneer but I know it’s a favorite of college news organizations as well as larger media companies. It’s easy, fast to set up, and you can drop it into any existing template.

The problem is that CoveritLive is yet another corporate blogging silo. Even before it was a part of Demand Media using it still meant putting your live event coverage in a wrapper controlled by a third-party. Not the greatest idea for long-term data integrity.

I’ve never understood why more schools, organizations, and media companies don’t replace a corporate tool like CoveritLive with a open source tool. Something like a WordPress site combined with P2.

P2 is just as much, if not more, of a live blog than CoveritLive. It comes with keyboard shortcuts, real-time updates, username notifications, and more. And, because it’s a WordPress blog, each post and comment has a permalink. Score one for linking directly to a reference in the future.

Like CoveritLive, P2 allows you to easily moderate comments on a thread while also adding photos, videos, links, and audio. Your live blog can bring in content from wherever you want on the web.

If you wanted to embed comments and questions from a Twitter hashtag that’s incredibly easy as well. Just use a plugin like Blackbird Pie to embed tweets into your live stream with a simple shortcode.

If you are a student, teacher, or someone else who needs help setting up a live blog get in touch. I am happy to help show you what P2 can do and talk about why it’s good to have data on your terms.

How New Ideas Almost Killed Yipit

How New Ideas Almost Killed Yipit. Vinicius Vacanti, co-founder of Yipit, writes about how new ideas and informed pessimism can derail a startup. The key is to stay focused and work through the “crisis of meaning.”

How to write 1000 words

Fascinating video from Scott Berkun on how to write 1000 words.

It’s great to see how an essay changes form over the course of drafts.