The Big Word Project, etcetera

The stated use which the project’s creators espouse, “changing definitions and creating a new tapestry of words, meaning altogether different things,” got under my skin and started pushing buttons.*

Damon listened politely as I ranted and railed against BWP as the antithesis of the semantic web, then we got back to fixing whatever it was we were doing. I imagine he was pretty amused later when I told him I’d bought a word.

Now, what Damon and I were admiring about BWP is how these two guys are likely to make a nice chunk of change for a very simple implementation of a pretty simple idea. I think I described it as a stupid sort of genius. The anti-semantic part was stupid, getting rich for it (or at least well appreciated financially) is frakkin’ genius! As of this writing they’ve got over 2000 words, if you assume a conservative estimate of $5 per word, that’s a nice ten grand they’ve already pocketed.

Since then, I’ve been burning extra calories in me olde cerebellum (incidentally accelerating my hair loss, so I NEED to get rich… The Hair Club for Men is not cheap) trying to come up with stupidly simple ideas that I can make lots of small profitable transactions off of.

This week, the iPhone SDK came out, I managed to download it, and build a sample app. It was very exciting, and much easier than the rigamarole I’d done for Palm apps. The two separate streams of thought merged, and I jotted down a few small projects I could hack out on weekends, and hope to sell for dirt cheap in medium to large quantities come July.

I thought to myself “Yeah! OK, now I can make some simple ideas – and get paid for it!.” The fantasies of excessive success driven in part by no-one else trying to do the same started up.

When I came to a few days later, the drool pooling in my office had risen to my chin. I swam over to a window and opened it (the neighbors flower bed is not suffering from our regional drought) before returning to my desk and checking the feed reader.

I was pretty hacked off to find Jens Alfke wantonly splashing my business plan all about the blogosphere…

99 cent iPhone Apps

You know, I used to consider Jens a hero of mine.

*When I was in the army (after I escaped from that Turkish prison) they experimented with cybernetic implants as a cure for shin splints, so that’s not a mixed metaphor, it’s just weird.

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