I’ve been admittedly lax in my german language studies as of late. Just yesterday I was musing that I’d like to find a way to make incremental progress in the language every day, even it was just five minutes worth of effort. I wondered whether there was some service that would send you a german word by email every day. And, of course, there is.

This business model, where people sign up for a daily email of information (plus an ad), has always interested me as a potential revenue stream. I like it because once you do the set up work – assemble the data and configure the email system – you just have to sit back and let the money role in. But this model only works with a particular kind of data – easily digestible, standalone data “nuggets.” A word a day is perfect because it takes little effort to “absorb” a word. Famous quotations – perhaps targeted to a particular religious of philosophical theme – are also good. So is “a joke a day.”.

I’ve been wondering if there’s some area I have knowledge in that I could convert into data nuggets delivered through email. Music theory? Not really… music knowledge doesn’t really break down to small chunks – to understand even basic ideas requires listening to examples, playing the ideas on an instrument etc, plus a bedrock of existing knowledge. Quotations? I don’t know many and it probably involves buying a database of some sort. Jokes? Perhaps I could do a “Dead Baby Joke” of the day? (My favorite: What’s the difference between a truck full of bowling balls and a truck full of dead babies? You can’t unload a truck full of bowling balls with a pitchfork.)