The top question I get asked from people, online or off, when they learn what I do for a living is how or where do I come up with ideas for new sites to develop.

I’ve talked about this before here, but to recap I’m basically a CNN and Discovery channel junkie. One or the other is on all day long in my office and for me they’re both invaluable resources for ideas that will be interesting for me to develop and hopefully profitable.

That works for me because for the most part I enjoy building resource sites. Either informational hubs on narrow niche topics where I’ll take all the information anyone could spend several hours searching for themselves online and put it all together in one place, providing an easy and encompassing resource on the topic–or tool resources like scripts or software.

What I don’t normally develop are community based projects. I’ve been involved with a few, but they haven’t been a major focus for me in the past, so I don’t really feel qualified to talk much about those.

Which is unfortunate because I’m noticing more and more people I talk or email with seem interested in such projects.

Thanks to a friend on Twitter today, I found a posting on RattleCentral.com where the folks behind Rattle share a development idea that they recently pitched to an Innovation competition for a neat site targeted towards younger music fans that would allow online communities to grow around local music scenes from anywhere, and then scale upwards with artists who gained momentum beyond their local levels.

The “Bands From Here” idea didn’t make the final cuts of the competition, but after reading through it myself I can see someone grabbing this and making a nice project (and profit) with it at some point. BTW, Rattle says they’re cool with someone doing that.

I think it’s awesome that they’re sharing this view of how project ideas are formed. It would have been nice to also hear of some of the spit-balling and brain-storming sessions that likely went into shaping the pitch, and since they’re promising to publish additional project ideas in the future too rather than leave them sitting in the dustbin perhaps they’ll describe the creative process even more in the future too.

Even still, as is it’s a great peek into what goes on before a project ever sees any code/design/financial investments and I think will be an interesting read for those of you who are, or wish to, developing community based projects.

Check out the full posting with the pitch for yourself at:

http://www.rattlecentral.com/blog/2009/02/bands-from-here.html

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Technorati Tags: ideas, online communities

Also See:

• How Much Is Too Much Social Web?
• 5 Days in the Valley of Yuck
• Get the Perfect Domain for your Niche Project
• The only rule you really need to learn

Tags: ideas, online communities

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.