Ask HN: How do I come up with an idea?

If you're interested in journalism, trends, government and information visualization / mashups and usability, shoot me an email.

I am still organizing the team while building the infrastructure, and I will add you to the mailing list to stay in the loop, maybe something for you after school :-)

For now here is an idea for you. After big political events, you usually have media coverage of opposing points of view using the same photo-set. After a Palestinian-Israeli peace summit, for example, you will see the same image with different headlines.

Scrape Google News for images pertaining to a keyword ("Obama" for example) and do a visualization showing one photo, along with every headline in a news article it has appeared in. You can use the TinEye API for that.

You will shock the world by laying rhetoric bare. In a future version you can add sentiment analysis to sort the articles in a two-column format, but that will require more programming (unless you opt for a crowd-sourced solution; two arrows "negative/positive", etc.)

If you like this, there is more where it came from :-)

Cheers!

Have a conversation with somebody who is interested in discussing ideas with you. It can be anybody, really, even if they aren't interested in pursuing something like you are. Just the act of having a dialog with a person (vs. the internal dialog you have when it's just yourself) has helped me time and again to get through a problem, come up with better ways to do something, work through the details of new ideas, etc. My thought process goes in directions it wouldn't go on its own. There have been many times when I'm just running something by my girlfriend, and before she even says something back, I'm thinking in different ways just because I said it out loud.

That was eerily close to how we came up with the idea for Lifesta. We went through a period of brainstorming after a previous idea didn't go anywhere. We focused on marketplaces as a base for brainstorming though we came up with things that were completely unrelated. Finally, and frankly as a joke, my partner suggested a secondary market for groupon-style vouchers since we both liked them and knew people that bought but haven't used them. When we analyzed the idea, we actually liked it a lot...

Try forcing yourself to write 10 answers to each of these questions (taken from a PG article):

* What do I find intolerable?

* What luxury can I turn into a commodity?

* What big companies solution could I make easier to use?

* What will kids in 10 years look back on and not believe about how difficult our lives were?

Also, here is an article I wrote on the subject a while back with some more ideas: http://www.startbreakingfree.com/146/10-ways-to-come-up-with...

Try thinking about things in life that you want to do but can't. Usually there's no reason, it's just the way things have always been.

You can disrupt these things. Look at the global fallout of the film and music industries. We did that. Us geeks.

The really, really hard problems are: governments; banks (finance in general); telcos. I'd avoid those until you've made your first billion. But they are great targets. They will fall one day. And someone will be responsible.

Here's a few. I moved house recently. I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to get rid of. I found that freecycle sucked -- at least in this part of the world. I wanted a freecycle replacement, but something much better.

For stuff I wanted to sell, there was no option but ebay. I have moral objections to ebay, lots of them, so I wanted something else. I didn't want an auction. Just a place to list and sell.

And on the list goes.

It's like the reverse of buying stocks, where you buy into the things that solve your problems.

Next time -- that'll be later today or tomorrow -- that you find yourself saying "ffs, it can't be that hard", go and fix it.

And don't worry if someone thinks that they are doing it already. Because you can do it better, if you just think about it.