Idea Day45: Share School Assignments
As the title implies, it’s a niche of the likes of documents sharing platform. I did search some academic related materials on scribd, but the results scared me (surely lots of returns on popular terms, but some too difficult, others too broad, and most importantly, lots of docs come from existed content of other sites, which means lack of originality). Maybe it’s still too early to have these DocTubes massively adopted; Maybe all websites are kind of “docs” and we can simply search them on Google. So, I think a DocTube concentrating on a specific field is easier to go mainstream.
The site I proposed only accepts students’ paper based homework such as term papers, assignments, field trip reports, in-class notes, results of experiments, past exams/quiz (with answers attached if you like), and anything that can be shared and reused. Of course the original owner of intellectual properties can decide what kind of authorization granting of each piece.
I bet this service would be popular if there are enough speculative students, and enough lazy teachers assigning indifferent homework year after year. 
But this service can be leveraged ethically and positively, since on the site you can find tons of references once every files are correctly tagged, or put in the right category (course name, for example). It saves your time when you are forced by ruthless teachers to do some boring research on boring topics. And I also believe notes-sharing plays an important role especially for those last-minute rushers struggling before mid-term or final exam. (How about add a function of wiki-on-course notes?)
By the way, aside from photos and emails/IM history, the most treasurable files on my hard drive are papers/reports from high school and university. They are not only witness of painstaking effort but also memories of school life. I would like to keep them on a safer place…all right, just safer than my HD. Is this another reason motivating students to upload files here?
Sphere It
I tried emailing your hotmail, but it didnt work for some reason, so im leaving my message in here:
Hi,
I just wanted to run an idea by you.. maybe it might be worthy for your ideas blog.
Most people use more than one social networking site. For example I personally use myspace, hi5, bebo and facebook.
The biggest hassle with being apart of all these sites is managing your profile information and the information that comes to you via comments or messages.
My idea involves a Central Site where an everyone uploads their generic profile information (such as about me, likes, dislikes, films etc), and possibly uploads their photos and videos too.
Then if you want to update your other profiles with new information (lets face it, likes, dislikes and the other sections (blogs in particular) in profiles are constantly changing with our lives), then you click the relevant button, and this central site will upload your updated information (and possibly photos and videos) to all the other websites.
An example of this.. I change my Favourite Movies section, click on the buttons for the sites I want to update, then it can update my profiles with the new information.
Additionally, an all in one message centre could potentially be extremely popular, as it is quite a pain to check messages across multiple social network sites.
Potential problems definitely lie with being to update profiles without user intervention. I know that for myspace, an external site such as ilike.com (it can add the ilike toy to your page) can update your profile without you having to do anything. I’m not sure how easy this is for other social network sites. Another problem would be with Photos, Videos and Music as they are usually uploaded to the actual websites servers, and this could take a very long time. Also, I’m not sure how welcoming the actual network sites will be to a service such as this.
Thanks.