meeting with arthur

i met with arthur ganson a while back (before i was miserably sick for over a week). and here are my thoughts from that.

I think one of the good ideas to come out of this, and something that describes my motivations for wanting to make this website is, in Arthur's words, that "the best ideas are triggered in unlikely ways." I want to help make a tool/application/website that helps trigger ideas -- by seeing other people's ideas, by explaining your own ideas, by being surprised, etc.

Another good idea is that with something like this, the bigger it is, the more valuable it is. The more projects, ideas, experiences to travel between, the more likely you'll find something that triggers an idea in you.

We discussed the fact that neither of us ever really got the whole electronics thing, that "every time [we] try to build electronics [we] just follow a recipe." And that maybe if you could understand, say, resistors, in a more general sense, then see their various uses in specific cases, maybe this would help encourage an understanding.

We talked about how the internet is good for something like this... thinking of it as a network of interconnected nodes. And we discussed features that might help make this more valuable =>

Searching by:
*material
*mechanism
*structure/devices
*location
*themes/tags/content
*function
*basic principles (e.g. ratio/power)
*scale/size
*durability/permanence
*pure ideas/thoughts
*code
*computation/sensing
*eureka moments/learning moments

so, basically, from this, I will try to have three main types of content that can be added.
1) basic wiki. general knowledge. editable by anyone
2) projects (like pearls of wisdom, or instructables). people talk about what they made and how they made it
3) experiences (more like a blog... personal). people talk about their own experiences in the more personal. eureka moments. etc.