Hi all,
I’m new here and just want to test the waters, so to speak. My idea is to enable charities to take advantage of crowd-sourcing. I blog about it here – http://petejamescollins.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/crowd-sourced-consulting-for-charities/ – and would welcome any feedback on the idea.
Thanks, Pete

Hello Fellow Business Ideas Partners,

I am looking forward to making things happen here.

@Ram

Thanks

My big challenge now is – what to pitch?

YourHat.co.uk
Wraply.com
Tubesurfer.com
PressKarma.org
???

Can only pitch one -so which should it be – anyone who’s looking for a project to join have strong preferences between them? I’ll pitch the project people would like to make happen. Let’s use the wisdom of crowds to whittle this down

Off for food now, but will be watching twitter on my mobile – i’m @steveparks there too.

@Steve – PressKarma sounds cool. This even has international expansion potential (USA?). In terms of monetisation perhaps we could provide a curated database with additional info for ”Pro” users (e.g. like IMDBPro).

I’ve come up with another new idea (as usual!), based on an idea that’s been rattling around the back of my brain for a while but has been crystalised by these recent events…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/oct/16/jan-moir-stephen-gately-facebook-twitter

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/14/starsuckers-tabloids-hoax-celebrities

..and my own experiences as a journalist.

The ’popular’ press is out of control in the UK. Stories are published, and republished, without any basis in fact.

Whether it’s the ’straight cucumbers banned by the EU’ type of lie that’s relatively harmless, the hounding of Diana and other celebrities, the news of the world journalists hacking into peoples voicemail, or the article in the Daily Mail today about Stephen Gately – the media has lost its moral compass.

PressKarma.org will hold them to account:. It will have a rating system for journalists. It will fact-check key stories. And sometimes it will turn the tables on journalists: let’s campaign to see the expenses of the editor of the Daily Telegraph, let’s organise a twitter flashmob to follow a celebrity-stalking photographer around all day and post photos of his life on flickr.

Maybe we’ll accept certain types of contribution from the community.

The business model will be akin to the Public Broadcasting system in the USA – voluntary subscription/donation. We’ll ask celebrities for anonymous donations (anonymous so it can’t influence our work on any particular story, and so they don’t feel it’ll make the media target them even more). We’ll also apply for funding from the Knight News Foundation. Maybe even Dennis publishing will give some seed capital , and partner with us to have a section in the week fact-checking a key story from the last 7 days.

It’s an app we can build in a weekend. We’ll pick up the tabloids tomorrow, start the journalist database by rating articles published tomorrow. We’ll fact-check a few. We can also be part of the response to the Daily Mail article.

The media needs to change, with it’s great power comes responsibility. PressKarma.org can help to make sure they accept the responsibility.

I really like this as a great project for us to rally around for a weekend – but is there a business beyond this? I guess that’s the key question.