As you can see from the funky sidebar to your right I have recently got to grips with twitter. Having previously dismissed the microblogging site on the basis that no one could be that interested in what I am doing now, I am only now getting to grips with the ways a writer can use it to communicate and share all sorts of good stuff via the internets many pipes.
My new favourite thing is the hashtag groups functionality. A superfast way to share links and ideas and anything else you can fit into 140 characters or less. Which brings me to, hopefully, my bright idea – #ideaswap.

#ideaswap does exactly what it says on the tin, if indeed it had one. Writers take a look at their notebooks, digital files, post-its, old dictaphone tapes, whatever and find any ideas they have had that they really don’t see themselves using. Then they post a brief post on their blog and/or tweet offering the idea up to anyone out there who wants to run with it. Then the person taking the idea can have a crack at writing something, anything with the idea, giving them fuel for another blog post about the piece’s development and possibly the groundwork for an interesting piece of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, faction, whatever. Links to blogs concerning #ideaswap pieces should be posted with the #ideaswap tag. 

#ideaswap hasn’t been nabbed yet on twitter so I am sticking a flag in it like colonists of old, taking #ideaswap for the writers of this world who play well with others. So, if you have any ideas that you just won’t wear anymore, #ideaswap them, its the authorial equivalent of giving to charity. As there’s no copyright to ideas, this should work reasonably well without incurring lawsuits and suchlike. And if more than one person wants an idea, we might have to come up with some kind of system that avoids cyberviolence to determine the new owner.

In the meantime, I am off to scour my old notebooks to see if I haven’t got a forgotten gem to giveaway.

Photo from Felipe T. Marques, at Flickr.