This idea literally came to me in a dream last night. It was a book, a paper book actually, and the first page was thick, with the consistency of three layers of cardboard. Sandwiched between that cardboard was a set of paper gears…

On the face of that page, lied several attributes. Name, eye color, hair color, personality; paper dials on each side of the attributes allowed for adjustment of them. From there, the pages began to flip, with sections of the book highlighted, responding to each of the dial turns.

My eyes slowly opened to a blurry “6:04″ in the midst of sunrise; between the state of sleep and wake, my thoughts were merging with reality. How would such a thing work? I began to ask myself. Was there something mechnical in each and every page, or was there something in the spine of the book itself?

My drowsy mind gave up on the realistic mechanical possibility, and began to think electronically. What if an e-book allowed one to specify these attributes, and the story could change based on what the user has chosen for the character of the story to be?

This concept isn’t new in gaming, specifically in the role-playing genre. The closest thing I can think of in terms of a book is the choose-your-own-adeventure style book, where you are constantly flipping from one end of the book to the other depending on the determined decision one wishes to turn to.

However, I’ve never seen such a concept in an electronic book. The ability to become the character, and have the story become attuned to your own creation. At that point, what kind of story does it become? Does it lose its identity as a genre? What kind of team would it take to write such a story?

I began coughing as I slept very early from having the flu, and got up to take another dose of NyQuil. Perhaps another dream will come again.

A year ago, someone I knew who was an editor for one of the Bay Area newspapers was telling me about how paper news is suffering a huge downfall due to online media. We discussed a bit about the shortcomings of paper media, and I had thought of a solution which I told him he would have a year to implement and credit for himself (as I’m not interested in doing it). It’s been a year, so now I will share this idea, and if you ever decide to try this idea out, I demand 1% of all profits generated from the idea (hey, it’s my idea).

One of the problems with paper news compared to online outlets is it lacks social interaction between the reader and the writer/newspaper. My idea is simple: enable readers to perform this engagement easily and rapidly.

Idea #1  – Full Feedback

- The interactions will be done via text messaging, or SMS. A shortcode would be issued to the newspaper (let’s say 12345), and each article would have an “e-code”, which gets appended after the short code. So if I wanted to make a comment on the article I just read that had an e-code of “A123″, I would text the following: “12345 A123 I felt the writer’s tone was a bit harsh on this.”

- This would be posted to the newspaper’s “portal” where an electronic version of the article appears, along with the text message posted.

- An account would be created from the person’s cell phone # on the portal where they can later use to login to their account to see the stories they commented on. This information would be the response for the cell phone.

Idea #2 – Limited Feedback

- As in #1, each article has an e-code, but the user has only two replies – YES or NO. Yes means the article was liked, while no is did not like. So if I liked the article “A123″, I would text “12345 A123 YES”, which would register a YES vote for the article.

- This vote would be recorded on the website, and feedback to the cell phone would be provided with how many people liked or disliked the article, along with a link to their portal account, where they can find more articles by a particular writer, or even see statistics on the top writers / categories.

How this benefits everyone:

- Readers can quickly give their feedback on a writer and the article they’ve read. This enables the newspaper to understand what readers enjoy reading and the writers they favor.

- Newspapers can perform segmentation and reach analysis. Since the cell phone number is given along with the text message, they can get an understanding of the reach of the newspaper by area code, and possibly gather more stats from those numbers.

- Having a portal where readers can log into will allow them and the publisher to see stories from their favorite writers, understand who are the popular writers, and what articles are being read the most.

- The portal can be used to advertise services and gear it towards specific audiences.

- Writers will be able to have immediate feedback on their articles.

- Newspapers can tailor their newspaper to show articles that are more favorable to their audience.

- Readers feel they have a part in the organization of the newspaper and the promotion or demotion of writers and articles.

Well, that’s my idea. I’m not sure it will save the newspaper industry, but I’m sure it would keep it going.

Posting this here because there were NO guides on how to properly do this in Windows:

LoadModule fastcgi_module modules/mod_fastcgi.so

   <ifmodule mod_fastcgi.c>
        Alias /php "C:/PHP"
	FastCgiServer "c:/php/php-cgi.exe"
	AddHandler php-fastcgi .php
	FastCgiConfig -minProcesses 1

	<location /php>
	SetHandler fastcgi-script
	Options ExecCGI
	</location>

	Action php-fastcgi /php/php-cgi.exe
	AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

    </ifmodule>

See more mod_fastcgi configuration options here. I strongly recommend using fcgid instead if using Apache 2.2 for Windows.