I was chatting the other day to one of my friends, Phillip, and he came up with the idea of a crime website.

Now this is an idea which many people have run with before here in S.Africa, and it appears that most of these crime websites have subsequently died. I know in the first 3 years of my site, that many people came to me with URL’s for their crime websites, and I posted it and supported them, and they seem to have quietly vanished.

I’ve been toying with turning the Straight Talk website (see: www.StraightTalk.co.za) into a “self-service” type of site. And it hit me that maybe a Crime Reporting page might be a good idea.

Virtually every person I speak to can come up and tell about wild and violent crimes which occurred in the last few months. So I thought, as a way of venting, perhaps I could encourage people to come to the site and report crimes.

But… maybe I can build on the idea. For example, what if, I allowed a person to come and write up the details of a crime which has occurred to him or his family and then… I email that crime to various people?

I’m thinking of Political parties. So as you report a crime, the site emails it to political parties, with your contact telephone number (if you want to be contacted).

I could even email the crime to various Security Companies or Block Watch groups??? (If anyone is interested).

The main thing would be for people to report crimes online and for them to remain online so other people can come and view them. At least then there is some type of public record of it and it gives people a chance to vent about something that irritates every one of us.

And, in a minor way, I do it as a small public service.

So that is the idea in a nutshell. What do you think of it?

I have been toying still with my Predictions Experiment idea. It can become very complex to do… but I think I will still create a “first cut” of the Prediction Experiment and we run that for several months, and see how it works out. I think people need to see it working in order to appreciate the concept. It will have a valid statistical value.

I would love to see how certain things in it pan out.

But I was thinking that the crime reporting page might have a value. There are many horror stories which do NOT make the news daily, and then in this way, I could allow some people a place where they can come out and tell their story. Crime is a hideous thing, and truly terrible crimes occur daily which people ignore. Jan]