Thoughts of a Flying Sheep

In a previous blog (http://flyingsheep.blogspot.com/2007/01/reformatting.html), I talked about the Content Problem. Some solutions:

Just do it
 Just suck it up and generate the content yourself. It's not enough to claim, "I have a proof for this, but the margin is too small to contain it." You actually have to work through the details.
 On the other hand, how else will people recognize that you solved the problem (which inspired you in the first place) unless you actually provide the content? It's not enough to build a better mousetrap, you need to design the promotional material that convince others to buy it.

Structure breeds creativity (the Rosewater solution)
 Break content into categories. If one category isn't yielding any new inspiration, switch to another. Set aside a certain time to generate content (each Sunday morning, for example).
 Partition the content you've generated into multiple dimensions. An oil painting of mushrooms and a watercolor of flowers have at least two dimensions - medium and subject. Then fill in the gaps (e.g. create an oil painting of flowers).

User-generated
 Trick your users into creating content for you. Creating a system/engine that makes it as easy as possible to create content may be a more interesting challenge (and thus, more likely to get done) than generating the content itself.
 Of course, the best part is that you can use this content-generation tool yourself (: 
 This also might lead to the Wikipedia problem. More on that later.

Random computer generated
 This is similar to the matrix-filling idea above. Write a program to generate the content automatically (again, possible a more interested problem). Of course, the test of your program would be the quality of the results - are they interesting? And for how long.
 For example, I could fill blogs with interesting (randomly generated) subject lines from spam I've received. Some of these subject lines are unintentionally insightful (or, for that matter, entertaining when illustrated ).
 This is basically found art.

Stolen from other sources
 Example: One of my first projects was a random horoscope (if you remember that, you've been a FlyingSheep Fan for a long long time). I grabbed a bunch of ambiguous predictions ("You are feeling unusually spiffy today.") and would serve up a few chosen at random. Alternatively, I could have classified them (something about romance, something about finance, something about friends or family) and added a little more structure (possibly the results would be more formulaic). Or I could have written a little program to play Mad-libs, and generate new content.

 So, these are some solutions to the content problem. There are probably more, but I guess my point (if I had one) would be to make sure that you solve the content problem (using one of these ideas, or something else) early on in your project.