I always find it hard to organize my reading (for most part technical reading). Do you think a service can help there? Like I can keep a track of books and papers I want to read and also get ideas from other people based on what I am currently reading/learning.
I am thinking more like a site that can help you stay focused and also provide motivation (by hooking you up with real people who are learning/learned what you are learning right now).
So yes .. its like shelfari but more focused on learning than casual reading
Evernote looks cool. However, can you use it to discuss ideas with co-workers easily? From what I saw it looks like a personal note taking app rather than a 'discuss ideas and arrive at actionable items' app. Just trying to get your perspective on this.
Kindling also looks pretty neat but they don't mention their pricing anywhere
In my view, a good idea is generally the merging of one or more crappy ideas and so-so ideas into something that's workable. Because of this, I think you need to provide some mechanism for the cream to rise to the top. For the use case I'm envisioning, sharing ideas with a small number of users, I don't think a traditional voting system would work.
Technically, I'd want something like this to be real time, shouldn't be too hard with ajax. There would also probably need to be supporting collaboration features, like chat.
jcnnghm, you should check out Kindling. (Disclaimer, I'm the founder - but I still find this problem very interesting.)
What we've done is provided each user with a set number of votes - by default 10 per room - and each user can put as many votes into one idea as they'd like. This forces them to make hard choices about which ideas are the most valuable to them.
This economy of votes has worked out surprisingly well for us in practice, and people become very thoughtful about how many votes they want to expend on an idea. I'd be curious your thoughts.
