I bumped into somebody last night on the way home from the shop, and the conversation was an interesting one for me.

The person concerned - Ikem Nzeribe - did a presentation at BarCamp Leeds last year about mapping that blew me away. It was clear he’d thought through the problem he was trying to address and he’d come up with a social, interesting, useful solution. After the talk I handed him my business card, and suggested we sit down and talk at some point.

So we did. Between then and now we’ve regularly met up and discussed plans either directly or as part of a larger group Ikem pulled together from his networks.

I hadn’t spoken to Ikem since The Vision Thing got rolling, and he clearly hadn’t seen it. I basically summed it up like this:

“There’s a chance I’m going to quit the industry in the next six months”

Two things struck me about that sentence. First, that’s the first time I’ve been completely upfront about where I was heading when I wrote the original rant. His reaction was incredulous, he thought I was winding him up: “You? You are going to quit? YOU?”, etc.

Yeah, me. I’m now thinking the change might not be that dramatic because I can now see ideas forming that address my concerns about how screwed we are right now, but I’m leaving it that open until something more tangible forms.

The second thing that struck me was the word “industry” in there. Which industry did I mean? Web development? Consultancy? Internet business development? Open innovation? Kagtum? Writing blogs and the occasional article?

A very good first step to me trying to stay in the industry is to start saying “no” to proposals, invitations to events, opportunities to comment, and so on. I’m fortunate that so many people want to work with me right now, but it’s stopping me from servicing my current clients and working out how to build great applications that don’t ultimately get monetised through “raising brand awareness” for soulless multinationals who want 75% profit on every unit of sugarwater they sell.

Ikem understands. I hope other people do too. For the record if it’s not one of these or doesn’t directly help one of these, I’m not doing it any time in the next six months:

• Accounts software with Adaptavist (coming to a close soon)
• The “Florida project” (I’ll explain more later in the year).
• My local consultancy project around corporate social responsibility
• The “open innovation” thing with Guy Dickinson and Simon Wheatley
• Kagtum
• Blogging
• BarCamp Manchester
• The occasional co-working day

That’s more than enough for me right now. Please don’t feel offended if I say no to an invitation to get involved in your great idea.

In the very near future, things are going to be changing at Vagueware.

Firstly, the site currently at vagueware.com is going down. I’m going to release the code running the idea bank as open source and you’ll be able to also setup a free hosted version of your own on Vagueware’s servers. Think of it as a bit like wordpress.org & .com but for open innovation rather than blogging. This will mean you can create your own IdeaStorm for your company or product.

I think open innovation and getting customers or employees involved in product and service development is going to be big in the next few years, and I want to help people get involved. If you have Ruby on Rails skills, patches to the code base will be appreciated as well - it’s going to be MIT licensed so that it follows the “Rails way”.

That will of course need a new name, and given that it’s all about constantly evolving and changing what you do and how you do it, it’ll be named Fluxish.

There are quite a few major changes needed to get the current build ready for that release, so don’t expect it this week. The ideas on the current site won’t be lost: I’ll be creating a special little hosted fluxish install and moving all the data and users over - I won’t be destroying anything, just giving it a new home.

So what will go in the idea bank’s place at the main site? Well, the new Vagueware site will concentrate on selling my consultancy and development services. There will also be a mini-blog there about the business, freeing this blog up from posts like this where I discuss what is going on inside the business. I’ll be highlighting companies I’ve worked with in the past and occasionally posting a page up as a more detailed article about the process of development.

This blog will become much more focused on innovation and emerging trends within the digital sector. This is an area I’ve drifted away from in the last three months, and I’m keen to get it back on track.

In addition, I’m going to be blogging more elsewhere in partnership with other organisations.

I’ve agreed to start writing more for O’Reilly GMT to try and turn it into a more mature source of information for the technology scene within Europe. I’m still working out and proposing what kind of articles those will be, but obviously they’ll not be about vagueware, not about innovation in software in the sense this blog will be, but aimed at a tech-savvy audience.

Also, I’ve been asked to contribute articles to ‘Manchester is online’, formerly ‘The Mancunian Way’. It’s one of the most read Mancunian blogs, and I’m hoping to bring some insight to a slightly less geeky crowd than the usual readership I get to speak to here. This is more of an experiment right now, but I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops. It’s the first time I’ll be stepping across into blogging for Mainstream Media, and I couldn’t be more pleased that I’m doing it with the team at the Manchester Evening News.

In short then, I’ve got a lot of writing to get on with over the next few months, so please don’t be too upset if this blog gets neglected at times.

Excuse the self-indulgent nature of this post, but I think I’ve been quite restrained on this for the last 12 months and hey - it’s Christmas.

At this time of year, two things always happen to me:

1. I get a little bit melancholic. My playlist changes to have lots of big sweeping chords (think ‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division, some Band of Horses, some Vaughan Williams). I watch films about people enjoying a simple life such as Harvey or El Perro last night, and think about de-cluttering my own.

2. I start thinking about why I do this for a living all over again.

2007 has been a pretty good year to me. I’ve written about 10,000 lines of commercially deployed code which is a lot. I’ve written several million words in blog posts, e-mails and essays which for me is average. I have about 40 business cards I didn’t have at the start of the year of people I will undoubtedly work with at some point. I’ve also undoubtedly upset, angered or annoyed people unwittingly (sorry!). I’ve almost certainly got things wrong.

Still, now we’re moving to the point where I ask what it is I do, why I do it, and how. Every 12 months I ask the question about whether I want to hire staff, whether I want to go big or stay small. Whether I need to start phoning some of the VCs in that little stack of business cards. Whether I should just go and get a job and not worry about money again for a while.

Getting rid of all the clutter and thinking about what it is I do, I realised whilst reading this article this morning that there is a vision out that there that is so pure in it’s concentrated common sense that at some point this year I once again stopped thinking about doing good stuff quickly and just started doing stuff that paid the bills.

Make it free. Make it simple. Make it open. That was the plan in 2005, so what happened to it?

I read Getting Real when it was first released. I advocate and often use agile methodologies, but there’s something I’m missing. All my projects seem bigger than they need to be. Sounds like I have an agenda for 2008 forming already.

And this is the point. I can make those changes because I don’t work for somebody else. I can take those risks and make those things happen if that’s what I want to do. I can just get on with it.

I never “got” code reviews. I never understood how sitting around talking about somebody else’s code would help them or you, beyond being able to weed out the obviously awful coders.

This week I’ve been doing some consultancy, in-sourced to help a firm evaluate what their developers have built for them. As part of that process I’ve had to review documentation, specifications and code. The process has been at times confusing and enlightening.

It’s one thing to be able to say “this is how it should be done” when you’re not a developer, but it’s another thing when you are a developer who hasn’t done some of those things yourself. This process has taught me as much about myself and my own code as it has about these guys’ code.

Interestingly, I now see things from a buyer’s perspective much more clearly, and I can see how frustrating this must be from the other side. I can see how things which we don’t consider important are to a buyer critical. I can see how clever solutions can sometimes be too clever. I can see how something simple you forget to do can make all the difference.

I’ve spent the last few weeks re-appraising my business plan in advance for 2008. Next year my business will pass its second birthday and I want to change the focus in a few places. I also want to bring other people on-board either as equity partners in specific products/services or as staff, and that all needs planning in detail.

The problem is, most business plans are dull to write and dull to read. I always felt that the inherent wordiness of them made them difficult to deal with, and they only made sense if you were looking for investment - you wrote them for people who didn’t know your business. I started thinking about what might be useful to write for people inside the business (i.e. me), and how it could help me make sure I was on track and doing well.

This morning my RSS reader threw up (via a Technorati sub to ‘business innovation’ a post called The Canonball Business Plan over at Seeds of Growth

The idea is quite simple. There really is a Canonball run (raced illegally), in the spirit of the film. The participants are attempting to break the record for a coast-to-coast drive, and produce a Driveplan that highlights key milestones en-route, fuel stops, timings, major risks from weather to what the ‘safe’ limit is to breaking the speed limits without ending up in jail in each jurisdiction.

What if we had something like that for a business plan internally? What if those of us who need to get a bit of focus sat down and thought about key milestones over a period, the risks and hazards, and the eventual goals. What if we updated it with real data as it comes in to see how we are faring against our guesses and predictions? On one screen we immediately see what we need to see.

It’s an interesting idea, and the only reason I can see anybody having to object against it is that it is inspired indirectly from a pretty cheesy film about bootlegging booze. The core idea seems sound enough though.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been getting some pestering from Manoj over my business and how to develop it. The conversation last week took it a step further: stop trying to do everything within Vagueware and instead concentrate on coming up with ideas and then - critically - finding the team to make the ideas happen. I might be great at ideas, and able to hold my own as a developer and somebody able to build a cashflow model, but I can’t do marketing to save my life. Nor can I handle PR, design, or think of everything else that needs to be thought of.

Of course, this took the usual pattern of my conversations with Manoj: we started with “Manoj, you’re such a doofus”, and ended with me thinking about it and conceding he might have a point.

Right now, I have so many ideas to work on they just sit here. They do nothing whilst on my desk. That was why I built vagueware originally - push the ideas out there, somebody, somewhere is bound to get on with them. I left myself with just a few ideas to work on:

• My own consultancy: helping businesses develop software solutions. Two years ago that took the form of offering services as a Rails developer and has evolved to the point that next year it will take the form of managing a range of developers and being the bridge between the business World and the geek World
• The Idea Bank: allow people to post ideas, and build a business around encouraging innovation
• Kagtum: A new way of thinking about news, relevant content and what people need to know about the World around them
• Fluxish: An idea I’ve not blogged about, but ultimately comes to down to very scalable “it just works” web application hosting that takes the pain away from growing an online business

Guess what? That’s still too many ideas. I figured with 400+ ideas, taking just 1% of them for myself and shoving the other 99% “out there”, the 1% would become manageable. That hasn’t happened and it means whilst the consultancy is doing “OK” it’s not doing “great” and all the other ideas are suffering from neglect.

I’ve made a decision then. I’m now reducing the number of projects I work on: my day job is now the consultancy and the idea bank.

Except I still want to make Kagtum happen, and I still want to make Fluxish happen, and there are four or five ideas outside of those I’d like to see come to life in the next 12 months.

How am I going to do this? Well, I’m going to start putting teams together who want to take equity in an idea and with a mixture of design, developer, PR and other skills, we’re all going to own a share in a business that we get to the point of being of interest to external funding - or even better, making money on its own two feet - with a view to exit.

So, if you think this sounds like something you want to work on (particularly if you’re interested in Kagtum or Fluxish), or you have skills outside of development such as PR and marketing, and you think you could give up 5-10 hours/week for a business you’d have equity in, you might want to get in touch with me. If you’re not convinced, you need some idea as to what is involved and want me to blog some more, leave a message in the comments.

On the train back from BarCamp Leeds today, Manoj Ranaweera and I were talking about various things. One of the points he made was that he found it very confusing what the difference between “Vagueware Ltd” and “vagueware.com” was.

In his head, Vagueware Ltd is a development consultancy, but vagueware.com was the idea bank, a place for people to share and collaborate ideas. He was convinced I should move the idea bank somewhere else and give its own separate identity. Give it a new name, a new purpose and have Vagueware as a consultancy and holding company for that site (and the others like Kagtum and Fluxish I’m hoping to launch soon).

At the start of the conversation I was adamant he was talking rubbish, but I reflected on it and within 10 minutes had changed my mind completely.

This then crossed over into another thought that Guy Dickinson led me to a while ago. Guy said the site as it was lacked focus, and it wasn’t immediately clear what type of ideas were suitable. He suggested narrowing it down.

So now the two ideas merge, and I’m thinking of something completely different.

What if you could have your own idea bank like Vagueware? What if for your company you were able to get customers to add ideas and let other customers vote on them? What if you could set up idea banks for open source projects, or private space for developing new product ideas with colleagues inside your company? What if you could have access to a clean idea bank in a few seconds? What if you’re running a BarCamp and you wanted to vote on talks as we did today (but ultimately abandoned as somebody was gaming the system)?

My vagueware ideas would have their own place, and that would be open. I might have a closed version for products I work on with clients in private, and I might have more public idea banks around specific products. You could get access to one if you wanted, and you could choose who has access and moderate it yourself.

This would all be under a new name (yet to be decided), and at the start it would be free.

Is this worth going on with? I’m now almost completely convinced a new name needs to be found, but what about a new kind of product?

Thoughts welcome in the comments. I’ll make a decision mid-week and by Friday “Decisions Will Be Made”, so speak up now or forever hold your peace.

I’m at BarCamp Leeds right now. I just gave my talk on futurology (quite well received), and a build of vagueware.com is being used to vote on talks to determine best talk of the day (the speaker of the best talk wins an iPhone).

A nice moment was when somebody stopped me when they noticed my name badge and spoke to me about Vagueware. It’s great meeting people who are enthusiastic. Alas, he wasn’t wearing his name badge so I can’t name check him, but it was a great moment for me to meet somebody who had seen vagueware, seen the potential and really liked it.

I’m now enthused to spend more time on the code in the next week.

When I started my business, I didn’t do things the way you’re “meant” to. I didn’t go out and get a nice office, or spend money on a brochure. To this day I don’t own a printer, and I send all my invoices electronically. For the first 18 months I worked on creaking hardware. My website was nothing more than a blog and I concentrated on just trying to get customers and pushing code out of the door - the shift into working for myself was big enough that it kept me busy without worrying about letterheads.

And at meetings, people politely laugh when I make a joke about “being too Web 2.0 and signed up to the digerati to bother with business cards”. Except I need business cards for all sorts of reasons these days. A year ago, I didn’t. Today, I do.

Last week a long-standing friend (and occasional colleague) launched Doddle, a printing service aimed at designers needing plain, simple, easy printing at low prices. It’s not true that I modeled for his logo - “Mr Doddle” - however I concede the resemblance is uncanny.

With a bit of prepped artwork - I needed help getting it into CMYK, because I don’t ‘do’ design packages - I went along, uploaded a zip file with the front and back graphics in there in TIFF, and filled in my billing and delivery details. It took about 5 minutes. That was Tuesday, and 10 minutes ago my new cards arrived.

I have to say I’m really pleased with the result. My cards are a little ‘unique’ in that they have a large block of text [1] on the back in quite small print, so I was worried if that would become a splodgy mess, but thanks to them being litho-printed, I’m pleased that it’s perfectly legible.

If anybody is looking for business cards, I’d challenge you to find a comparable quality at the price (especially for double-sided). I’m pleased therefore that recommendation of my friend’s business isn’t down to a form of nepotism, but because the product is actually worth the money.

[1] If you want to find out what exactly that block of text is, you’ll have to ask for a card. :-)

After a brief spurt of articles, I’ve slowed right down posting. It’s not accidental - it’s very considered in fact - and I thought it might be worth sharing a few plans.

I had a queue of about 90+ articles in draft ready to be finished and posted. At a rate of three per day, plus adding at least two more in draft form onto the queue I would have had the momentum to keep me going through to the end of the year.

I stepped back though and thought about why I wanted to publish here, what this blog was for, and whether that was a sensible strategy. I started asking whether I should care if this tool does this or that tool does that.

There are much bigger ideas we’re heading towards that need something more thoughtful than twenty blog articles a week.

I have yet decide my approach, but what readers enjoy matters. I get virtually no feedback about what people like beyond Google Analytics tells me, and it tells me little. I get few people quoting me and linking back to articles. I get few comments. In other words, it’s a little hard to know what is working and what isn’t beyond “being angry about Leopard” gets me traffic.

Questions for you then: what articles do you enjoy or hate? What do you want to see more of or less of?

A friend just sent me a link to an article on 43folders asking the audience:

How do you know when it’s time to move on? What makes you make up your mind?

You have no idea how many shelved ideas I have right now: that’s why I built vagueware, so I could take my ideas and put them out there for others to work with. Right now, I’m not getting the time for that that I need, but will do shortly.

There are then the small number of ideas that I do want to work on but can’t afford to right now. Those ideas are ones I intend to hire people to help make reality for me as they’re just too big for one guy on his own. If they’re not rolling by January, I might shelve them too and concentrate on what I do to make a living (which incidentally, I enjoy).

The question I have is for the readers here: I know you all have ideas you’re not doing anything with. So what’s stopping you putting them on vagueware? Do you really think you’re going to work on it in the next 6 months? Don’t you want to be like Frank Schmitt who in answer to that question said:

Finally an oddball outlet I have is halfbakery.com. I have a lot of what seem like semi-decent ideas that I’ll never realistically have the time and/or resources to pursue. If I post them there, I can at least claim bragging rights when someone else gets rich off the idea.

Halfbakery is a great site in all sorts of ways, but I always found it satirical. What about those software ideas that can really make it but we don’t have time for? What if vagueware helped teams of people come together and produce open-source versions of your ideas? Isn’t that something donating ideas you’re not working on to?

In other words, why are you not posting ideas to the site right now?

I’m not posting many articles this week (either on the blog, or on the main site) because I’m doing an awful lot of running around the North of England.

Yesterday was Leeds for the GeekUp over there. I didn’t get a chance to speak to as many of the locals as I wanted, but I think I’ll be heading over there again in future. In fact, I know I’ll definitely make it for November, and hope to make it for December. It was busy last night - numbers were probably higher than the Manchester event last week. Next week it’s the Liverpool GeekUp, which I’m also hoping to make.

Today it’s meetings around Manchester with patches of downtime for coding, and tonight it’s mashup* over in Sale which I’m looking forward to. I’m not sure what to expect of the talks, but it should be interesting to hear what some of the more ‘suit’ types are doing right now. If you make it, hope to see you there. If not, I’ll hopefully be blogging it anyway. If you’re a geek and the £25 entry fee is causing you problems (we were all students living on Pot Noodles once), let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Lee Strafford who is willing to help you out.

Tomorrow, it’s Liverpool and the Open Schools Alliance event I wrote about on O’Reilly GMT at the weekend. That’s a whole new area of interest for me, but I’m starting to realise that open source in schools is going to matter. IT skills in schools in general is going to matter, in fact - the current stance is that computers are black boxes not to be meddled with, and that’s going to have dire impact on our technical culture a decade from now. I feel like we’re letting a generation of potential geeks down right now.

Normally when on the road I’m able to get a reasonable amount of work done - I don’t drive, so trains with handy power sockets are my preferred mode of transport - but this week is proving difficult. Therefore, make the most of the peace and quiet.

Thing I hate most about being constantly on the move: not having a decent home-cooked meal. Vegetarian options on the move are dire and mostly involve cheese. Bah.

There are two kinds of innovation I want to talk about on vagueware:

• Ideas for whole new products and services that can be delivered with software
• Incremental changes to existing software products and services

I spend most of my time thinking about new products and services, the kind of thing that you can start a business off. Those ideas are generally jealously guarded by the people who think they thought of them first, but the simple truth is they have little value without execution: vagueware.com is about trying to get people executing on those ideas.

I have hundreds of ideas on my desk, on my wall, in my head, on my laptop, in notebooks, everywhere. They’re not going anywhere where they are. I do not have the time or the capital to make every single one of them happen. By placing them in the public domain over the coming months, I hope to do a couple of things:

• Somebody, somewhere will do something with them
• I will get the satisfaction that whilst not benefiting monetarily, I helped an entrepreneur and his customers

I hope that if you have an idea that you realise you’re never going to make happen, you’re going to have the courage to place it in the public domain and allow open source developers, start-ups and hobbyists in need of a way to spend their evening get started with it. They might even give you money, you never know.

Then there’s the second kind of idea - the incremental idea. The idea where you see a product or service out on the web or on your machine and you think “that’s great, but if it did…”

I’ve started cataloguing ideas I’ve had for vagueware and tagging them ‘vagueware’ - you can add ideas for vagueware too, and tag them so I see them - and as votes move up and down I’ll see what’s popular and what isn’t. I’ll use the tool itself to decide what to work on next within the tool. Yay for recursion!

I hope other developers use the site to do the same. By putting up ideas on the site for your own product and asking customers to go along and vote, you can get an assessment of what is going to fly and what isn’t.

Every page is editable, wiki-style, so your customers can improve your idea. Every idea has comments so you can have a little conversation around an individual idea.

By looking at a list of ideas in vote order, you can decide what is going to make customers happiest. By putting it on a 3rd-party site like vagueware, you get exposure to a whole bunch of people interested in people like you - innovative developers - who might not have heard of you anywhere else.

Or maybe you can just put an idea up and tag it with a publisher or product name in the hope that somebody at HQ will see it one day and act on it.

Whilst pretty rough around the edges - and I’ve not got many ideas in the system yet - vagueware.com is now up and open for business. Depending on when you measure it from, it’s either a few weeks or a few years over-schedule. At least nobody can argue it’s over-budget.

Right now you can:

• Add new ideas - the whole point is to get ideas for innovative software solutions into the system. What counts? If it’s software and it doesn’t currently exist, it counts
• Edit existing ideas - It’s a wiki. I’ve still got to sort out proper version control, but any registered user can edit ideas so that collaboration can start with developing the idea itself. At the moment you can only add tags, not delete them, but that’ll get fixed in the next update
• Vote on ideas - voting up or down allows for a weak interaction. People who don’t want to comment but have an opinion can provide it, and hopefully better/more popular ideas bubble to the top
• Comment on ideas - It’s a conversation after all

There is a long, long way to go to get to where I want to be, but at least it’s now up and people can start getting involved in what I’ve been talking about.

Over coming weeks and months I’ll be adding features (you can of course suggest features by adding them and tagging them ‘vagueware’), but for now the basic framework is in place and ready to start taking ideas.

Some time ago I setup an online bookshop with Amazon.co.uk and their aStore tool. It’s not had much love for the last six months, but I’m going to be putting a fair bit more time into it in the next couple of weeks. If you have any suggestions for products or books that should be featured, please let me know in the comments.

The observant will also notice that as of today, at the bottom of each post above the comments is a little ‘tag cloud’ of relevant Amazon products. Amazon’s algorithms are a little whacky at times, so it might take a while for genuinely useful products to show up. I’m tempted to change this into something more traditional, but I want to see how this new kind of advertising might work.

I also intend in the next few weeks to introduce a very small Google AdSense block onto individual story pages placed between the headline and the article body. If you’re reading this site through the feed - and if you can’t or don’t want to use a feed reader, you can now subscribe to feed updates via email using the form in the sidebar - you won’t see any adverts, ever.

These moves are just meant for the 11,000+ people who pass by here every year without ever stopping by again: they obviously didn’t get any value out of what I wrote, so perhaps somebody else can help them.

If people find these moves really intrusive, I’ll obviously reconsider them.