Halfbakery

I found this site a while ago (probably through del.icio.us/popular). I've had it opened in a tab ever since, intending at some point to post about it. So, here goes.

The site is called halfbakery. From it's 'about' page:

The Halfbakery is a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users. It was created by people who like to speculate, both as a form of satire and as a form of creative expression.

So, it's basically a site where people can go and post ideas that they've had. Say, for instance, I thought it'd be a good idea to create a home-use intravenous delivery system for Mountain Dew, I could post it there, and others could comment on it's potential uses, improvements, or failings.

Some examples from the current batch on the homepage:

• The Segway Hoverdisk -- It will revolutionize cities!


• Apostrophe-Hunting -- Use the power of Google to hunt out unwanted and overworked apostrophes.


• Cow Armour -- "This cow sponsored by AOL" (this one's for Gary)

As you can see, a lot of the entries are silly and/or satirical. But, every so often, there are some ideas that could either actually work, or at least think about something in a new way that could inspire an ideas that could work. A couple examples:

• Tall tower wind power -- Build a gigantic tower for a gigantic wind turbine


• Fracture detector -- A pre-X-ray test for common fractures

And specifically for Elroy, the blog-hater: Print-on-demand newspaper kiosks.

This one, that Elroy the blog-hater says is my destiny, is one that I've thought about a lot. I've thought it would be cool to setup a political idea/policy wiki, whereby people can build up a collective political platform, through debate, discussion, and compromise: Open-source political manifesto

I thought that readers of this site, several of whom discuss random ideas like this with me all the time, would appreciate this site.

Update 7/19/05: I just noticed that there is an RSS feed for recent inventions.