Orchards Ripe with Ideas for Articles

Writers, are you looking for your next great story? Do you spend hours dreaming up articles? Discussion forums on social networking web sites are the perfect place to find high quality concepts. These public venues are rich with compelling original, under-developed, unexploited, copyright free ideas. Good discussion forums even provide numerical data that lists how many page views and posts the discussion has had since it was created - this allows authors to gauge the validity of each potential property.

Good writers are respected citizens of the web
While it's not acceptable to cut and paste each member's response to a curious query right into your article on the same subject, it is okay to 'borrow' their ideas. Ideas cannot be copyrighted. Don't pillage other folk's anecdotes and call them your own, as every good writer knows, it's not necessary. In today's Web 2.0 world it's considered good form to leave a link to each discussion you reference, and always link to the exact source of a particularly unique inspiration. Often times this builds community and is more beneficial than claiming the creator's glory as it heightens your own prestige as an online citizen reporter.

Good writers process raw concepts into powerful articles
The secret to harvesting good content from online discussion forums is to think outside the chat box. Good article writers understand why forum posts get emotional - they comprehend the ideology in the text. If a religious fundamentalist writes about his God one way, and other members of the community oppose his view, his next response will probably be more emotional. Good writers will preserve the reasoning that produced the most emotion - good writers will repackage these concepts and try to recreate the same triggers that have now been proven to yield the most emotion.

Good writers seek mature discussions
It's no secret that my favorite discussion forum is WonderCafe.ca where the threads are surprisingly clever and the average participant has at least one university degree. And generally speaking the members here are not particularly religious, and certainly not given to preaching their ideology, except perhaps in the Religion and Faith subsection and or in response to a provocative post. They are however uniquely familiar with religious subject matter - they don't suffer idiots that misquote the Bible or use scripture to propagate radical positions.

Plant ideas and watch them grow
Rather than prowl the forum with scissors and blatantly copy other people's ideas right into your word documents (which may or may not be illegal) advanced authors submit their own raw ideas and watch them grow and take shape as they are digested by the membership. I did this on WonderCafe.ca last night. (Friday July 27^th 2007) when I posted the following thread, 'Urban myths made popular by marketing' which is an idea that occurred to me while driving yesterday and listening to CBC radio in my car. The host interviewed a City of Toronto spokeswoman championing tap water - it has a bad reputation in Toronto because of powerful urban myths propagated by bottled water companies. So I planted this fertile little seed as a discussion on WonderCafe.ca just to see how many other urban myths made popular by marketing the members here might donate to my work.

Membership is free
Discussion forums are free wild orchards full of ideas for article writers, and gardens of fertile minds for advanced authors shaping sophisticated concepts.