Idea Economy

The Flow of The Network

Here is the problem. You have ideas, people, and time. How do you route ideas to people in the least time ?

A solution is to:
- organize all the ideas so they are browsable, searchable, linkable, and commentable.
- allow people to express how important the idea is so that it is seen by more people
- allow people to directly route ideas to people they know
- create an idea economy

An Idea Economy

How it works:
- You have an idea or you hear of one.
- You decide how much you would pay groups of friends to read the idea. Some you might pay more, some less.
- You decide how much you are asking friends to pay you back if they like the idea.
- Your friends read the ideas that pay the most first and payback the ideas they like.
- You see who liked the idea. You group people by what ideas they pay for and use this to set how much you promote your ideas to those groups.
- You use your profits to promote ideas further.

Small World Networks

A small world network is one where the average number of connections between any two nodes is low. This is the "6 degrees of separation" between you and everybody on the planet idea. So you can imagine that the idea economy way of passing the same idea from person to person might route it to that one person that really really needs to know it.

Not Just Ideas

So maybe its not an idea but a problem, a wiki, or a top 10 list. Everyone gets paid to participate and contributes funds to pay for people's participation. X amount for every problem solution and Y for every solution that works. X for every item added to a top 10 list. Y for voting for an item. Z for any item that makes it into the top 10.

Gourmet Spam

What if you could answer a question and everyone out there could pay you to read their ad, or idea or whatever. Maybe you have a separate inbox for it all. It would let all the information about you out there get info to you. Maybe you assume an anonymous identity and people pay you to answer questions. Are you going to buy a house in the next 6 months ? Are you looking for a better job ? Maybe you have a really specific question you want people to answer. You only pay people in city X to answer. And its really not spam. Spam is free to send. Someone could set up their inbox to only accept messages that are pay to read. Spammers would be forced to send to a narrow audience. Someone might set a question/ad adrift like a message in a bottle among everyone that answered a question with a specific answer in hopes someone might pick it up.

Why

If people get paid for the information they share, they will invest more in what they share and create economies of social interaction that scale and self organize beyond the simple barter economy of friendships.