Elwood P Dowd's Journal: Brilliant Website Idea

everybody-is-a-celebrity-now.com

or maybe

whattheinternetisfor.com

or something along those lines.

It would be a social networking reference site without participation from the people being listed. A wiki with an entry for every person that anyone feels like listing, no matter how unknown they are. A haven for libel, self-aggrandizement, harassment, and stalking. Everything would be public, and all information submitters would be anonymous. Perhaps each person listing might have an associated forum along the lines of the wikipedia talk page, or 4chan, or say-so.com, so that dialog about any given person would be longer-lasting.

Each page could have a section at the bottom with authoritative information (or rebuttals :) entered by the actual person being discussed, but then you'd have to vet whether this person claiming to be Ben-Donley-of-San-Francisco really is the dude being discussed on this particular person listing. Perhaps people could pay money in order to be vetted and put their information up, like a public encryption key.

Hosting would have to be in some kind of legal haven, because many laws would be violated in many nations. That would be the hard part. Maybe figure out who hosts the pirate bay, and go get hosting with them. Of course, if the primary function of the site turned out to be a libel/harassment machine, then it would be lame and I wouldn't want to do it. But I think it could be an incredible resource. Like Wikipedia white pages or something.

It could also turn into a public mirror of private credit information, like previous addresses, phone numbers, employment and relationships. If people started posting SSNs, it could screw up our current shared-secred identity system. Dunno. I'm really curious and I want to find out.

It'd make money, but...

[sam_handelman]

Possibly not enough to cover your legal fees, assuming it became popular.

Re:It'd make money, but...

[ediron2]

Oh, ick.

I've never wanted to join classmates.com (the few people I want to find, I imagine I *can* find), but if former classmates were allowed to post world-readable info and the only way to challenge or edit or silence incriminating and/or embarrasing stories was to subscribe (under some lame corporate excuse like 'paying for a membership via some trusted credit card allows us to confirm your identity'), I imagine that'd bump their membership numbers up. Way up.

In this future, it ain't *brightness* that

Re:It'd make money, but...

[Elwood P Dowd]

I told this idea to my mom and she said, "Maybe you shouldn't be a lawyer."