I found this on 43 Things about blogging:

I've never been one to keep a personal journal or diary. But I always managed to fill up the pages when all of my literature teachers used to make me keep a journal. Maybe that's because they always gave us very specific topics to write about.

In high school, my art teacher had a monthly sketchbook assignment. You could always sketch whatever you wanted, but you had to at least complete those sketches. These were usually 10 things something along the lines of "A Christmas tree as visualized by a: child, carpenter, person in love..." etc.

The sketchbook assignments usually led to some really creative ideas of things to sketch. The art teacher was pretty open to whatever you were doing. He was more concerned with how creative you were, versus how much you shoe-horned yourself into the theme.

So when I found myself reading that entry, I thought to myself, "Wow, wouldn't that be a great idea to help spark my creativity?" So since one of my goals is to blog more, I figured I would see if there was anything like that. I googled Blogideas, and came up with Blogideas. Here is an example of their output:

1. Things you would do if you weren't afraid.
2. The perfect pizza.
3. Strangest thing you can find on Ebay.
4. Some over used words.
5. Seriously... Where does the other sock end up?

Seriously (an over used word), where did the other clichès end up?

The majority of blogs out there are banal enough without such wonderful ideas as "Breakfast: Yes or No?" or "Who do you blame for your mood today?". Blogideas is a wonderful idea, but the execution is poor. This is where the concept of folksonomy comes in. If you open up something like this to the public, you need to provide a good method for filtering. There are a few different ways to filter:

Filter Through Rating

This is pretty simple, if its a dumb idea, it will get rated lower. At a certain threshold, (like 10 ratings, and the average rating is less then 4) the idea disappears into the bitbucket. This would (hopefully) ensure that truly banal ideas like "Breakfast: Yes or No?" get the quick death they deserve.

Filter Through Difficulty

Make suggesting an idea difficult. Not impossibly difficult, but certainly harder then typing in a bit of random text. We're going for quality over quantity here. If it takes some time and energy to submit an idea, then chances are the ideas that are being submitted are worth something.

This also ties into the ratings. If it is a little harder to rate an idea, the ratings will be better in general.

Filter Through Community

If there is a community of people who care about the content (and the community itself) then you have a self-policing mechanism here. Wiki Wiki Web is a classic example of this. While there are problems, especially when prominent members of the community start to go mental-ape-shit, in general this can work.

Fuchi

So the ultimate is to wield together folksonomies and a community to get together an idea pool for things like: creative writing, photography, sketching, blogging, etc.

So I am thinking a simple web app. Similar to del.icio.us. Like del.icio.us it should be simple, sparse, and free. It should also be as user-unfriendly as del.icio.us. Easy enough to use for someone who has enough energy to spend 2 mins to figure it out.

User Stories:

Just a quick note for all the non-programmers out there: 'user stories' are descriptions of what is needed for a user to use a piece of software. It is a method for a programmer to effectively build a program without getting caught up in all the traps that programmers are likely to get caught up in.

• User can sign up easily. Login ID, Email address.
• User can rate an idea, between 1 and 5 light bulbs
• User can change an ideas rating
• User can submit an idea
• User can comment on a submitted idea
• User can tag a submitted idea
• User can view ideas by
  • tag
  • user
  • popularity
  • most recent

Maybe I can build it. If anyone out there is willing to hack up some PHP with me, I'll host a SVN repository.