My Ideas - 1st Set

My first five ideas for products & communities:

1. A user-operated live music database. This would allow people to submit setlists and reviews of recent concerts, show upcoming concerts by venue and artist, use Last.fm to provide listening statistics on bands, use Flickr and Youtube so that pictures and video from concerts could be integrated, use Google Maps to provide graphic itineraries on artists' tours, and maybe even host concert recordings by taper-friendly bands. I envision this to be sort of similar to RateYourMusic, except that this would be for live music what RYM is for recorded music. Some fan sites compile information like this to varying degrees (WilcoBase for the band Wilco, At Ease for Radiohead to provide two examples), but for less popular artists, this kind of information is hard to find.
2. A comprehensive website for 2008 presidential candidates. This would be sort of an umbrella layout, first going by party (all of them, not just the two major ones) and then going into each candidate. Every candidate page would have their positions on major issues and what their getting elected could do to effect that issue. It could integrate news stories on the candidates from Digg and/or Deli.cio.us. This idea might be hokey, but I could also see a sort of "candidate search engine" so that people could enter their positions on certain issues and see what candidates they align with. It sounds kind of pathetic that this would be useful, but the media's coverage of the presidential race is more pathetic.
3. A comprehensive resource for people in rural American communities. In my opinion, nearly all media is biased towards urban areas. There are plenty of those small-town papers everywhere, but those usually just talk about middle school science teams and bingo nights. I think people in rural areas, such as farmers, could use a resource that would deliver to them news that matters to them, such as information on energy prices and food prices and FDA regulations. I think this could employ sites like Digg to find relevant stories as well as maybe some kind of RSS feed to deliver information. (I wouldn't worry about these communities being disconnected, most just have older connections, so something that loads quick would be important. For instance, in Vermont, the only consistently broadband connected area in the whole state is the Burlington area--for the most part, everyone else still has dialup, but there are plans to make a statewide broadband WiFi system by 2010.)
4. A forum for people involved in college radio nationwide. This could include a database of college stations around the country, a discussion forum where people at different stations could connect and discuss issues that college stations are dealing with. This site could also include news on music that's popular among college radio and news regarding communications in general (for instance, FCC news).
5. Along those same lines, a way for those involved in college journalism to get together. This could use a discussion forum for student journalists to talk about the issues that affect them, and a way of compiling good stories from different online college publications from all over the country.