Where did you have your great idea?

Monday, March 31, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Wired has a fascinating photo-essay with narratives from famous innovators explaining where they were when they had their biggest idea.  

For example, Reed Hastings got the idea for Netflix in a movie rental place in La Honda, CA (a fairly remote place between Palo Alto and the Pacific Ocean). 

Now that we have digital cameras and know people from far away through our blogs, Twitter and Flickr, it seems we could tell stories like this about the places we live and more mundane but still important events in our lives. They could become quick collaborative documents like the Wired photo-essay.  

Examples:  

1. A photo-essay of opening days at all major league ballparks in the US. 

2. Church services in every major city on a given weekend (different religions have services on Friday, Saturday and Sunday). 

3. Following a candidate for the Senate or House as they campaign for one day. (The major news outlets don't cover local races very well anymore.) 

Projects like this are important warmups and proofs-of-concept for amateur newsgathering, and perhaps new politics. It's not just for Democrats or Republicans, maybe this is how we bootstrap new parties, or maybe it's just for fun. Who knows. Learning doesn't have to stop when you leave school. I like stories, esp short ones, along with pictures of places and people that are different or strangely familiar. This is part of what I meant in yesterday's post. Let's reset the dial back to the beginning, start small, and stay small. Now we have some new tools that we didn't have last time amateur public writing started up (or whatever it's called).  

There is no A-list, just people with ideas.  

The difference is people doing it for fun, versus people doing it to either get rich or earn a living. Yes, there really is a difference in approach. 

PS: In case this turns out to be a great idea, I had it in my kitchen.