Idea a Day

» see ideaaday.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Idea a Day was started in London in August 2000 by David Owen, a music executive, along with two people out of advertising and a schoolteacher, working with a web shop called Fortune Cookie. The premise was one sentence long and it never changed in fifteen years. Every day, one original idea, submitted by a reader, published with the submitter's name on it and no ownership claimed by anyone.

The ideas themselves are the whole charm. Fireworks that play music while they explode. Plaques in cafes commemorating the famous books that were partly written there. One from October 2015 proposes toe sleeves, skin-colored covers you slip over ugly toes before wearing open shoes. The entry filed on 27 March 2015 reads, in full, that airlines should be made to keep two pilots in the cockpit at all times, which was three days after the Germanwings crash and about a week before most of Europe's carriers decided the same thing on their own.

I turned sixteen the year it started. The web you could reach from a modem in Turkey back then was assembled mostly out of small sites that did one thing and kept doing it, and a page earned its bookmark by having a reason to exist rather than by being placed in front of you. Idea a Day was built precisely to that spec. Nothing else could have run fifteen years on volunteer labor and borrowed server space.

The best five hundred were collected by John Wiley in 2003 as The Big Idea Book. On 16 August 2010 the site celebrated its tenth birthday on BBC Radio 5 Live, which is a strange and lovely thing for a one-page website to get.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it worked ~

There was no voting and no ranking, and no comment thread decided which idea deserved a slot. An editor picked one from the submissions and it went up with a date on it. The archive accumulated as a flat list, thousands of ideas deep, and the only way through was to keep clicking back.

That design is why the output reads so differently from everything that replaced it. A modern idea site optimizes for the ideas people want to upvote. This one optimized for Tuesday, and what you get is an enormous pile of mostly useless suggestions with a handful of very good ones buried at random intervals.

~ free hosting, twice ~

The site never paid for hosting in its life. It was donated from the start, and in August 2011 editor Chas Bayfield had to post an urgent appeal on the front page because the hosting company had shut down and eleven years of ideas were about to go with it. A new sponsor turned up and carried the archive from there. By the end it was running on a free WordPress.com blog, which is the fourth or fifth version of the same arrangement.

~ the last idea ~

The archive sidebar on the final version of the site is the honest record of what happened, and nobody involved wrote it on purpose. It runs September 2014 through March 2015 without a gap, and then jumps straight to October 2015. Seven months named across the final thirteen, with a seven-month silence sitting in the middle of 2015 and no acknowledgment of it anywhere on the page.

What actually got published in October 2015 was six ideas across nineteen days, and then the Man Up shop on the 29th. A site named for a daily rhythm had been failing to keep that rhythm for over a year, and what finished it was no bill and no takedown, just the slow discovery that producing one idea a day is a job.

The pages outlasted the posting by a decade. ideaaday.co kept answering into 2016, ideaaday.org kept answering until 16 September 2024, and the first failure in the record is a 406 on 4 October 2024. The domain gives nothing now. Fifteen years of other people's ideas, donated by the people who had them and kept online by people nobody was paying, ended without a single notice going up.

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