Obviously I'm not the first on the block to this idea. Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig's book, The Future of Ideas, is available for download via a CC license. The book is largely about the ways in which copyright stifles dissent and innovation; in it Lessig argues that the notion of “property” that sustains contemporary copyright is getting in the way of the prosperity created by the internet age. (And, speaking of prosperity, welcome, everyone, to a world in which the US has the #2 economy!!)
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If you're looking for books on ideas, you could do a lot worse than Lessig's; Ideas are Free is a guide for managers who are looking to gain a competitive edge by using their employees' ideas. It does have charts showing how Japanese companies got more ideas from their employees while paying them less for them... so there you go.
“Ideas are the engine of progress,” Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder write in the book. And surely this idea itself is the product of what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the capitalist world-system, and we might call “modernity.” Indeed the combination of “idea” and “progress,” the idea that the former is central to the latter, and the metaphorization of that relationship in the term “engine” articulate in an almost ideally concise fashion the ideology of the technological Enlightenment.
But all this is much too serious. The point I had been wanting to make is that my website full of free ideas would also have a crucial category of ideas, namely, ideas so annoying or dumb that no one should pursue them. Hopefully the sheer shame of seeing your article or book idea on someone's website as a dumb idea would keep you from writing it; or, if you really believed in your idea, you might go to it with some classic American stick-to-itiveness, saying something like, “That idea website doesn't think an article on vampire boobs will fly! Well, I'm going to write the vampire boob article that changes the world!!”
Even this might be a form of progress, since I would be willing to read any article on vampire boobs written in that spirit. (I recommend starting with Vampirella, below.)
In conclusion, I would like to point you to the website of John E. Stith, a “writer and technologist who spends a fair amount of time thinking about the future.” His page of Free Ideas features quite a few ideas that he seems to have made up in July 2001 and not added to since. (Somehow this says something ironic about the idea of a free idea page, but let's not think too hard about that.) Among them are a “venetian blinds with mirrored surfaces” and a “family home page.” I am amazed that since 2001 no one has used these ideas; the family home page one is at least decent.
Also, in double conclusion, I would like also to point you to a site called “Creativity Pool,” which features lots and lots of ideas. What's amusing about this one is that it requires you to describe the “reward” produced by your idea. So that:
An illuminated keyboard which will enable users to work in reduced ambient light especially ideal for laptops and tough notebooks.
Reward: A laptop with illuminated keyboard
I hope I'm not the only person who, having read the description of the illuminated keyboard designed especially for laptops, then read that the reward of this idea was “a laptop with illuminated keyboard,” and thought, yes, that is a good fucking point about that illuminated laptop keyboard.
In triple conclusion, that is what I think free ideas can do for you.
p.s. Google has 377,000 hits for “illuminated keyboard” and 50,060 for “illuminated laptop keyboard.” Lots of the former for sale, but none of the latter! Come on, science!
p.p.s. The top link for “illuminated laptop keyboard” is on a Dell website called ideastorm.com. Here, Dell has cut the employees out of the Robinson/Schroeder system, and is just getting its ideas from regular people, for free! Of course they will then patent them...
macbook pros have illuminated keyboards.
i would offer some free ideas but years of televisual pop culture exposure have atrophied my imagination to the point that the list would look something like:
a device that could simultaneously cut your hair and vacuum up the clippings.
write a novel, the conceit of which is that a scientist, after a tragic time travel accident is doomed to “leap” from year to year solving problems and righting wrongs.
raise a baby in the highly controlled environment of a giant dome and broadcast it as a television show.
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