I have mental picture of millions of people driving back and forth to work (and other places) over and over again. It’s almost like Brownian motion. Even if people rarely took long trips, there would be plenty of this routine, back and forth motion to ship all the packages we could possibly want, if only there were a service that gave a percentage of these drivers the right incentives, information, and infrastructure to hand off the packages at the proper moment. USExpress could be that service.

To make this more concrete, I’ll use my father as an example. His commute is about 120 miles, round trip, five days a week. That means he drives 600 miles a week, just going back and forth to work. Suppose that my Dad picked up 5 packages somewhere near home, dropped them off somewhere near work, and then reversed the process on the way back. Let’s say he did that just once per week, forty-five weeks out of one year. By making a few extra stops he will have driven 60 miles with 5 packages 90 times. That’s 27,000 package miles, which I have to think is a lot more package-miles than my parents actually send out every year via existing shipping services.

ram them down: UsExpress, a business idea

(via Global Guerillas)

When I was at CD Baby, I’d be able to play with new ideas immediately. (“What if we had a $5 sale?” “What if I could co-op card swipers?” “What if I could go multi-lingual?”) Any time I had an idea, I’d be able to test it out within days.

But now, for the first time in 10 years, since I had no company, I couldn’t test out these new ideas! All I could do was read, think, and maybe write about it. Damn!

Then I realized why I need to start a new company. Not for the money. Not because I’m “bored”. But because a company is a laboratory to try your ideas. (The word “laboratory” is defined as a room for research, experimentation or analysis. I think of it as a sandbox or playpen.)

Derek Sivers: Why you need your own company

(via Josh Kaufman)

43 Folders discussion of using RSS feeds for calenders, todo lists, etc.

I wrote a draft proposal for Evergreen when I worked in the IT department for a web based PIM system for students that would output RSS feeds. The main reason for this was that students could then use the feeds anyway they like – on PDAs, any OS, etc.

I still think it’s a great idea for helping college students get organized. If I get this new job, I’ll have to dig out that proposal and check some of the apps from this thread.

Anyone thinking what I’m thinking?

Camera phone movie

$200 digital film

Machinima

3D gaming on cell phones

Voodoo

DIY video projectors (or and commercial portable projectors)

Red | Blue

Wireless future

Open Source TV

To furthur demonstrate my insanity, I’ve decided to start an mp3 format lit mag.

Obviously, this is still in very early planning stages. The basic idea here is to publish spoken word stories and slam poetry on Mperia. There’s a lot to be worked out still.

1. I’d kinda like to do only stories, fiction and creative non-fiction. But I do like the idea of having lots of stuff: interviews, essays, slam and/or spoken word poetry. If I include poetry, I’d like to have another editor dedicated strictly to poetry.

2. I think it would be fun to have perhaps one track of music per issue. But I’m not sure.

3. There’s the matter of recording standards and so forth. One person I talked to about this wants to include music with his submission. Others probably won’t. Should I prohibit music in order to keep the tracks consistent? Or should I try to compile a large amount of music that the voice tracks can be mixed with so that all tracks have music.

4. Will I take text submissions and try to match them with voice talent? Or only take submissions in which the writer does their own reading? Or require writers who don’t want to read themselves to find their own voice talent?

5. Mastering. I don’t really know much about mastering, or how difficult a process this will be. Is it really necessary for a project like this? Is it such a difficult project that no one would volunteer to do this for free?

6. Money and copyright. Ideally, I’d like to offer most of the money from mperia sales to the writers and voice talent. Keep a small percentage for operational costs. Leave the copyrights to the creators, so long as they agree to a Creative Commons license that allows for the mp3s to be freely distributed. There’s the kicker there, though. I’d like to encourage people to share the mp3s once they’ve downloaded them, maybe even link to free mirros of the tracks. Not sure if anyone would go for this, though.

7. “Cover art” would be nice to have for each issue.

There’s a few lit mags that already publish stuff in audio on the web: here are a few. The Corpse also has an audio section (probably the closest thing to what I’d like to do). But I think this will be something different and new. An edgy collection of works by new and newish writers, purely distributed through audio tracks that can be used anyway the listener would like (on an iPod, on a CD, on their computer, etc.).

So. What do you think?

Before I left for Europe, Brenden sent me this listing for a haunted wine cabinet on eBay. A few months ago I posted this ghost in a jar on Technoccult (the listing’s not online anymore, though).

I don’t remember what the jar sold for, but the wine cabinet sold for $280. I have no idea what it was worth. But it occurs to me that this sort of writing could be a new way to make money and find an audience in fiction. Taking an object, giving it an interesting backstory, and sell it on eBay. How much of this goes on?

And yes, I suppose the story could be true. I want to believe that there’s a John Constantine out there scouring eBay for magical objects as much as the next guy.

Well, I’ve got this site, and Technoccult, launched as Winksites. But I wanna find some other uses for Wink than syndicating existing sites.

One idea, is to create bits of fiction to be read on mobiles. In Smart Mobs, Rheingold talks about a company that publishs novels about teenage girls who have sex with businessmen for money. I haven’t heard about this being done anywhere else, but I have heard of a place that e-mails bits of chapters of classic novels everyday.

I’m not sure this would work well for lengthy, serious novels. But it would work for serializing short stories. Or for sudden fiction (short short stories). Erotica, suspense, cyberpunk, and “slipstream” are suitable genres. Hmmm… a slipstream literary journal, for cell phones?

(of course, the site wouldn’t be available only to mobile, but would be created with mobiles in mind… It’s easy to use Movable Type to post to the web, RSS, and e-mail. The RSS feed can be used by Wink, and the e-mail can go to a Yahoo! group, which provides its own set of options.)

I would also like to see Wink used for more political stuff… not sure what yet, though. How widely available is WAP in 3rd world countries? Perhaps this would be a suitable environment to begin constructing a set of bookmarks for “digitally divided” countries, as Josh proposed on MW a while back.

Becca commented on my earlier post about a all-gender gender magazine, “what kind of content, exactly, would fill this magazine, if not academic content? I guess I’m not entirely sure how to make gender issues not be academic. I’m sure there are ways, of course”

The magazine should be analytical, but not academic. I think it’s entirely possible to be one without the other.

A couple things you brought up in your comments would make good content.

An article exploring the different interpretations of the word femenist (which could include a poll as well as person on the streets interviews) followed by a round-table discussion or series of interviews debating whether the word is still valuable and if not, what viable alternatives are.

An article discussing the exclusive nature of many women’s/gender groups and how that can be solved.

Other ideas:

a critique of the stereotypes perpetuated by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

A discussion of the changing role of the male in societies, the surface of which is only scratched in this business week article about the new gender gap (whether this gap is really as deep as the author of this article makes it out to be, the role of the male – both heterosexual and homosexual – is in flux).

Anyway, I’m not going to have time to do something like this myself. I just wanted to throw the idea out there (partially to see if something like this already existed).

Another idea which it seems like someone must have come up with already: ransoming art/content/whatever.

The idea is simple: a content provider sets up a donation box and publishes material enough money has been made. It seems this may only work for someone with an established reputation as a good content provider, but as long as the goals set are reasonable it could work.

This solves a couple problems: it prevents there from being a toll box on the information superhighway as some people have put it (a real problem considering that what’s a micropayment in the US could be considerably larger in a third world country, where even getting internet access is very expensive). But it also encourages people who have the money to donate it.

I see this working particularly well for big name musicians… what if Trent Reznor says he won’t record another album until he gets a $6 million advance from fans? He’d probably get a lot of the money from just a couple of rich nin fans. Then he could release the album on p2p networks and completely bypass the entire label system.

But it could work for someone like E-Sheep Patrick Farley too. I would donate towards a ransom for a new E-Sheep comic.

Update: from the comments: Abe points to Street Performer Protocol.

I’m gonna do some idea-blogging over the next few days, trying to get some ideas out there for some feedback (or at least so I don’t forget them).

I’ve had this “games as musical interface” idea for a couple years. A number of “generative” and “fractal” music programs out there (check out this listing). Mostly the interfaces consist of typing in numbers, moving sliders around, or dragging something around the screen randomly. These don’t seem like engaging interfaces.

The idea of using games for an interface isn’t new: this guy has a 3D fractal music game: however, I’ve never been able to get it to run on my computer, and now I can’t even find the download on his web site. My idea is to use a series of constantly changing classic games clones – Pacman, Space Invaders, Tetris, etc. The position of different game objects act as the random data for a music and graphics generator, making it easy for almost anyone to create music and visual compositions; even if they’re not good with music or at playing games. It also creates a game in which the goal is not to “win” but to create interesting music. This could also work as a multi-player game, with the data being split between the two players.

One important aspect is that the “voices” should be configurable. Output to MIDI, or to a set of samples (a la MOD tracking programs) .

A bit of a head-trip feature I’d like to see in the game: the games constantly morph into each other. One minute you’re playing Tetris, moving a block around, and then suddenly the blocks you’ve stack start to look like a maze and your block is pac-man. Then ghosts show up and eventually the whole game is Pac-Man. You play this for a while, then it starts to turn into Space Invaders. Which then turns into Astroids. The changes are random, Tetris sometimes turns into Astroids or Space Invaders instead of Pac-Man.

Jeremy Winters doesn’t think Max/MSP is powerful enough to create something like this. I would like to see it done in Flash, but I kind of doubt that’s possible either.

(should I post this to Margin Walker?)

Einsturzende Neubauten had a subscription program through their web site through which subscribers could watch and listen to the band’s studio sessions and then leave comments in a forum. So essentially they were letting their fans have a say in the album before it was completed. This wouldn’t work for a lot of bands, but it makes sense for Neabauten. Pigface should do this as well.

Some things Pigface have done: let audience members call up and leave messages on the office answering machine for use in an album (Feels Like Heaven, Smells Like Shit) and more recently let fans send in tapes and CD-Rs of them saying “fuck [something]” to be collaged on a Pigface record (not sure if that stuff ever got used). Also, they let fans vote online for which songs they wanted to hear on the “best of ” album.

I was thinking, someone could setup an audblog and have people upload sounds form their cell phone to be used in collage or glitch projects. Or, mixed live at a laptop gig. I don’t know how modern programs like Buzz or Fruity Loops work, but it would be pretty simple to use an old tracking program (like Impulse Tracker or Mod Plug Tracker) and create some “patterns” in advance and then download samples using a venue’s wifi connection during the show and then plug them into the song. A soundtrack of the world in almost real time.

So remember back during the summer when I was talking about a writing game? Well, Brenden and I have started to figure the story out, and now we’re wondering how many people would like to play. We’re going with Abe’s suggestion where each player is a character or if needs be, each player might have a couple characters.

This message is for Brenden Simpson – I don’t have access to ICQ right now, and I’m never sure what your e-mail address is. But, anyone interested is welcome to reply.

While I’m waiting for the perfect Live Journal narrative idea and video graffiti idea to strike me, how about:

1. We write an outline, with say 10 landmarks (more might be necessary).

2. We setup a content managment system.

3. We take turns writing 250 – 500 word chapters.

4. We plan it out so that we alterate hitting landmarks.

5. The idea is, to make it challenging for the other guy to execute his assigned point on the landmark without doing ridiculous things.

6. Also, keeping consistent with characterization will be a challenge.

7. We should probably write the outline ourselves, but it would be fun to invite more people to play.

8. One chapter a week?

Thoughts on the Live Journal interactive narrative idea:

1. I don’t want to do “the story game” (where each person writes a piece of the story).

2. I don’t want to do a simple novel serialization like Class of 91 or a “writing in public” excercise like Listener by Ellis or Unwirer by Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross . But, I wouldn’t rule out the idea of doing a project using Movable Type, a wiki, or some other collaboration ware. (Brenden, you game?)

3. I’m thinking of trying to work with non-fiction (to be true to the journaling purpose of the community). But I don’t want to duplicate the Fray or City Stories and the like.

4. I want to find some way to integrate filters, social network features, commenting and so on.

5. Perhaps a sort of non-fiction role-playing game? Or a game with “assignments” to be carried out in real life, and then reported on in the journal?