Ideas, various and sundry: Part III

After writing the (More) Ideas, various and sundry blog post earlier today, I started to think of more ideas I would like to share. I thought about calling this post (Even More) Ideas, various and sundry), except I wasn’t sure what the series would be called if I did another post. Hence, the series will not use “Part: …” to distinguish between posts.

But you’re here for ideas, not the semantics of my titles!

Here are a few ideas related to the web and software I have had that I would like to see exist:

• A printed zine for the indie web. I would love to see a magazine, perhaps quarterly, that encourages contributions from people with personal websites. The zine could be about the culture of having a website and participating in the web community. There could be featured websites and tools, lists of ideas, “what’s hot” sections that show new ideas that many bloggers have been experimenting with, and more. I would subscribe to such a zine.
• A tool that lets you write locations in a spreadsheet and generates a map that you can share with friends. I share coffee shops I have been to in various cities on this website, but it took me a while to write this system and it only works with my website. I would love a tool where I can either paste in Google Maps links or add information like the name of a place and city and a map is generated that I can share. The map should be available via a private URL, although there should be an option to make the map public.
• An app that lets you take a photo of a book and check if you already have it at home. This is perhaps an idea for a feature of a personal library indexing tool, but nonetheless I would love to see this exist. I often go to bookstores and wonder do I already own this at home? I now own two copies of Breakfast at Tiffany’s because I bought one having already purchased it months earlier.
• An app that lets you take a photo of a book and returns a description on a focused, easy-to-read page. Sometimes, a book doesn’t have a blurb, or I want to learn a bit more about a book before purchasing it. In these cases, I would love to be able to take a photo of a book and read a description, without lots of meta information about the book. This site should work well with slower WiFi connections.
• A tool that generates an RSS feed of the repositories someone has starred on GitHub.
• An RSS feed that broadcasts what plants I should look out for in the UK at the moment. This feed should show plants that are expected to bloom in the next month or so. I think this would be a good way to learn more about plants. It would be passive: I see a plant and I can think about its name. If I see that plant in real life, I will either: (i) be learning to identify it, or; (ii) forget the name and go back to my feed reader to remember the name. Perhaps this should also be on a web page, too.
• A t-shirt that says “It’s semantics.”

If you want to discuss any of these ideas with me, please send me an email at readers [at] jamesg [dot] blog. I am happy to discuss any of them in more depth.