MappingTheWeb //

Just over a year ago, I came up with (what I thought) may be a ground-breaking business idea. Now you must remember, I’m fairly business savvy, but I have very little technical/programming expertise. HTML is the extent of my technical skills. So I embarked on a journey to find a skilled programmer. Through my network of connections, I got joined up with a now-programmer at Flock. We dabbled at the project for a couple months, but then it got put on the backburner. It’s been months since we’ve worked at it, but I still think the idea itself is pretty darn good.

Ok, so I’m looking for feedback on the project. I’m also working for people who want to contribute or participate.

So here’s the deal: We started a site/concept called Gawsip. The basic premise of the site is to discover the latest news on a given topic via blogs, Digg, video, and news sites. In doing so, you can also enter simple demographic info: age and sex. Users of the site can then check out what other users in a particular demographic group are searching for. This all sounds a bit confusing, but becomes more clear once you use the site.

The underlying idea and concept sprung from the fact that I wanted a transparent way to find more information about what the specific demographics were searching for. There is no hidden agenda here. You can enter your info or remain anonymous. But once a critical mass of searchers start using the site, the data becomes more valuable and relevant. In addition to this, from a revenue perspective, you can work directly with advertisers to target the specific groups of interest and/or tailored the results pages around the search term and toss AdSense into the mix. With so many possibilities and ideas, I have no clue what to do, where to go, how to take this to the next level… or if I should in the first place.

I am going to leave it at that for now, but there will be follow-up and more to come. Please feel free to e-mail me or comment. Now let’s get this discussion going…

NOTE: The site has been up and down inconsistently, so please try back if it doesn’t load the first time.