The Ideas Factory

That’s me that is…

Seeing as I have about 100 bad ideas a day, and maybe a good one every month or so, I thought I’d just start sticking them up here.

Most of these ideas will never see the light of day if left to me to implement, as I’m a: busy, b: lazy and c: not in a position to do a lot of them. So it’s no skin off my nose if someone wants to do them for me – but it’s nice to get credit.

Also, I like a challenge so if anyone has any "how would you improve X" type questions then I’ll happily try to think of things for you.

So here’s my idea that I had this morning to improve online mapping services (like google maps, or live local):

Let webmasters / bloggers et al. embed the map viewer in their pages, in the style of the YouTube viewer. A fully featured map embedded in a blog post, or even perhaps an e-mail (can you spell killer feature?) would rock, and naturally, drive traffic and users to your service.

Anyway, it would be something like this: (but hopefully better)

But instead of inserting a rubbishy old Web 1.0 image and link, you’d get the full dragging, zooming and maybe even right clicking functionality of the map – just like you get from visiting the actual site. 

Anyone want to challenge me on improving anything else? Ideas are free, ask in comments or via e-mail, or any other way you can think of.