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NickDouglas

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Om Malik has died 27 days ago

I knew Om when I was an ankle-biter writing for a Gawker blog. He was gracious and generous. Felt like everybody's favorite uncle. I hope I can be as kind to others as he was to me.

Tomorrow, the whole front page will be about feeling your face sting and going "Ow! Ow! Ow!" in front of your bathroom mirror.

But if you're coming up with zero ideas, adding three a day is an improvement. What you call "forcing yourself," I call every writers' room and recording artist contract.

I didn't write much good material until Valleywag made me write twelve blog posts a day. Only three or four were really good -- but that's three or four more good posts a day than I was turning out before.

I just started a blog called "Bad Idea a Day" (it's at that .com, but I'm not trying to advertise it). I force myself to think of a product, story, lifehack, or any idea each morning.

It's just for fun and mental practice. But so far I like my ideas, and I'm already talking to a designer about possibly turning one idea into a product.

You could do the same with a blog, Tumblr, or Twitter account named "What people want." Every morning, think of something people want. Do it again at lunch. Do it again at dinner.

Make the account private if you want, but I recommend putting ideas up in public. You're more likely to find a partner and willing free advice than to get your idea stolen.

I live a block away from the Craigslist office (which is, yes, in a normal-looking house/storefront with a charmingly ugly sign above the door). I often walk past it during business hours, but the gate is always closed and locked.

I bumped into CEO Jim Buckmaster (a friend of mine) near the office, and I asked him about the locked gate. "We all work upstairs now," Jim said. "We had to keep the first floor locked up because people kept dropping in to say how much they love us."

"Every single idea is derivative. Many successful products are simply about taking something that exists and then changing its focus or its look."

Yyyyyyes...but understand that Truemors is rather more "derivative" than, say, the iPod or Windows 3.11.

If 500 people are willing to pay $10 for a piece of software, a developer has two options: 1. Make it on your site for $5000 (minus your cut) and feel good about themselves; 2. Make it themselves, sell it on the web for $10, and make much more money. So much for others' incentive to produce your product.

You hit my biggest problem with the idea: Gossip already spreads better among networks of people who care. It's not some concept I can just go to a page for. So the topic of the content is not a value add.

As for the technology, we've seen how cheap and reproducible that is. News.yc, Reddit, Digg, Netscape, and dozens of other sites have technology that probably beats that of Truemors. So the company isn't worth buying for that.

Some companies get bought for their employees. Well, Guy's "1.5" employees, if he's talking about a full-timer and part-timer other than himself, aren't visionaries, they're just people who can turn around one of Guy's ideas. Come to think of it, that makes them better potential hires for a big company than most headstrong, visionary startuppers.

So Guy just spent $12k making himself feel good. By doing so, he demonstrated how detached he is from the real world -- which, psychologically speaking, is a fine way to live. If you're like Guy and you can afford to blow $12,000 doing it.