Alltop, which I have talked about before, has gotten me thinking about how much of the future of web applications may just be small ideas that are unique and well done and attract a lot of repeat visitors. I think people spend too much time linking about big ideas – things that are massive and complex and solve some sort of big problem that people immediately realize they have. And yet small ideas that solve problems that may not even exist in reality but that spark the imagination may prove to be more popular in the long run. And if they are simple and inexpensive to operate the monitizition required to recoup investment may be much less.

So here a look at a couple of “small ideas” in hopes that there are more out there I am missing.

Alltop is a site that aggregated lots and lots of blogs. The blogs are grouped into an increasing number of categories. Once the initial work was done, apparently in fairly short order, the hard part is picking the right blogs to aggregate and putting them in the right categories. Since the popups that give people a preview do not include the whole post people have an incentive to visit the actual blog for more. People save time looking for interesting posts and people who write interesting posts get more traffic. Win win all around.

icantdeci.de – this one is new, its very simple in every way and its a lot more fun than serious. Full disclosure, Aaron White who was my student for a while once upon a time is one of the people behind this one. In this site, subtitled “a techno-crutch for the chronically indecisive”, people can ask short binary questions and after answering a few of them from other people see what others have selected from their options. So you can enter “Chinese food or Thai food” and in a few seconds get a result from some number of random people. Or you can just blow some time by answering a bunch of random questions and seeing what other people are answering. It’s not at all possible to take the results serious (well not for me anyway) but it can be a fun way to procrastinate for a few minutes and be mildly amused.

I think that instant messaging was also a small idea – just send messages to someone you know. Twitter and clones are a small outgrowth of instant messaging. Facebook started out as a fairly small idea and grew into something huge. But really so did search engines. Of course over time building a search engine became a lot more complicated than writing a web crawler (which often gets assigned as a school project in universities) and indexing the results. We keep looking for higher quality search results.

Will some of these other small ideas grow and evolve into big things? It’s too early to tell. But over all I suspect that the next really big thing on the Internet will start off as a small idea by a couple of crazy people. Sane people only come up with boring ideas.

In the school district where I live there are a number of blogs and online forums that discuss local politics and related issues. One of the key topics is the schools themselves. Recently the local newspaper brought up the issue of concerns around the schools with a nod to these forums and blogs. (No links though. I wonder why.)

In the article, one member of the Timberlane school board (Stephen Brown from Sandown) charged that the online forums and blogs were not the most appropriate place for this discussion.

There's a time at every meeting for parents and taxpayers to make comments about the district, but that time is rarely used. Brown said it's a much more appropriate forum than posting on blogs.

"We listen, we discuss and reply to those comments," Brown said. "We are constantly striving to make the school district better."

If I didn’t know better I’d think that Mr. Brown was a naive idealist who had little idea of how the school board meetings worked. But of course he’s been around a while and knows exactly how the meetings work. So honestly I am suspicious of his suggestion and of his apparent attempt to move discussion from a wide open and very transparent location to the relative isolation (in time if not access) of a school board meeting. School board meetings are held only a couple of times a month (often less in the summer) and are time limited. Not everyone can make it to a meeting and not everyone can be accommodated on the agenda. Oh and by the way the school board has complete control over who gets on the agenda and how long they can talk.School board meetings are not a good time/place for real conversations with the public. Why? Well first off because time for the public to speak at such meetings is particularly limited. Secondly these meetings are not good for back and forth discussions. Generally boards allow a statement, let the board members ask a couple of questions, and the meeting moves on. There are just too many people involved, too little time, and the chair has much too much authority and responsibility to limit discussion with the public. Thirdly it would defeat the purposes of having a representative elected board. Board meetings should be about getting things down and board members should be doing their homework and talking to the people they represent outside of the meeting time.

It is of course quite appropriate for people to bring issues to school board members outside of meetings. They can do it in person, by phone, by letter and by email (though I have read at least on complaint about a constituent using email to a member of this school board). Why not through other, more public means though? Letters to the editor have long been popular. Today the Internet is a great platform for getting ones thoughts out. It seems to me that online forums may be the single most appropriate venue for discussion of public issues. It is very public. Access is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And everyone can participate.

The school forum for the Timberlane Regional School district that I participate in has had close to 40 topics under discussion in the last month and a half. How many of them do you think the school board would have had time to discuss in open session with active participation from people who are not members of the board in that time? Somehow I think not much.

Lots of public officials are unwilling (some would say unable) to participate in online forums. There are rules around disclosure of some things such as personal and disciplinary matters of course. But rarely are people asking about things that cannot be discussed in a public meeting. I wonder how many people are just afraid of letting their feelings and opinions known. Oh sure meetings are public but not as many people can get to them. Watching on TV takes a lot of time as well and minutes of meetings often leave out quite a bit that may not be directly related to discussion under vote. So posting to online forums makes people, not just officials BTW, somewhat vulnerable to people correctly understanding where they stand on issues. I’d argue that is good for honest, transparent government. But you know lawyers tend to like as much to be secret and “non discoverable” as possible. And elected officials are easily infected with that attitude.

I really hope that political discussions at all levels, but especially at the local levels, continues to move to the Internet. Let’s bring as much of the discussion into the open as we can.