The 9 to 5 Alternative

Astana, Kazakhstan Cityscape

Last week’s idea:

Calling all blog ideas! Get those creative juices flowing. Don’t think about the vision, think about the basic idea. Find your content. You can always market an idea behind the content. Start with these two:

• Email From Grandpa – a blog that posts quirky emails from family members. Patriotic, religious, comedic – many chain emails come to mind. Especially current events like politics and celebrities. Start with 3-6 months of content and focus all your time on marketing.
• Infographic Hub – a blog that posts different infographics and categorizes them. Inspiration from this collection, this collection, and all the infographics in GOOD magazine. Same deal as Email From Grandpa – start with 3-6 months worth of posts.

Last week’s comments:
Well, both John and Nate thought that Email From Grandpa would be a good idea. I went ahead and registered the domain name www.emailfromgrandpa.com; if anyone wants to partner up and get this started, shoot me an email! Address in the info box on the right.

This week’s idea:

Promote visual recognition of the world by creating a multiple-choice, image-based geography game. Here’s a rough batching process I had in mind:

1. Collect 150 cityscape images from 150 of the world’s largest cities.
2. Sort the images into three different levels: 50 that are “easy” to recognize, 50 that are harder (or “medium”) to recognize and 50 that are “hard” to recognize.
3. Map out the game. Think about both visual and mechanical elements – illustrate what you want the interface to look like and write out all of the steps that must be programmed. Here’s what I was thinking—the user can play three different levels, where each level has 10 different images (that rotate randomly out of the bank of 50). Each image will have multiple-choice cities for the player to select from. There are many ways to take this from here.
4. Read Source Control.
5. Find a virtual assistant (many different options) and outsource the programming.

This is just what I had in mind. Again, similar to my invitation with Email From Grandpa, if you feel like running with this, get in touch.

Hope everyone had a good weekend. I know I enjoyed Boston’s snow. This week you can expect two more PMBA reviews. I’ll most likely be discontinuing the Sunday Sandbox after the first of the year, so keep your eyes out for my last couple!