While all people and all professions need to find inspiration, it can be particularly tough for web workers, especially those of us operating solo freelancing oe consulting businesses with no coworkers, bosses or others to help come up with ideas. We can sit in a dark room and wait for inspiration to hit us, or we can seek it out. I get most of my inspiration from listening to podcasts, reading, having coffee with smart people and browsing around online.

I was recently talking to Hideshi Hamaguchi here in Portland, Oregon when he mentioned that he was working on a new project. He described it as, “totally different, super simple, but something help people to get inspiration” and offered me a sneak peak. I couldn’t resist. It was an excuse to talk to someone so brilliant that it always makes my head spin after a conversation and learn about a new product focused on inspiration at the same time. This week, the product launched as Lunarr elements.

The concept is very simple. You see one element, a picture or a quote, at a time, and you can move on to the next element whenever you are ready. The elements that show up in your stream are influenced by the people you follow, the other images you like, and additional factors, so each of us has a unique and personal experience.

In an interview by Kristen Nicole of Social Times, Hideshi Hamaguchi described the product:

“Elements is a toy for inspiration. It will aid in the first phase of concept building – the moment of inspiration. Elements offers you the room to be inspired without reservation, without limits, and without distractions.”

I like how Bram Pitoyo described his experience with Lunarr’s elements:

“Personally, I liked Lunarr because it allows me to, for just a few minutes every day, flash through numerous elements and freshen my mind. A tired or saturated brain shouldn’t be forced to think any harder, anyway (inspiration always strikes when you least think about it, right?)”

Inspiration strikes each of us in different ways, and we each have a unique experience with finding our inspiration.

What inspires you? How do you find inspiration?

Take for instance a Google doc: pop it into Lunarr (if you get accepted to the beta program) and work on it as usual. Then, click on the page turn in the upper right hand corner and you flip to the back side of your doc where you can invite collaborators, link supporting documents, track revisions and see who’s seen your latest version. Lunarr works with any URL, not just Google docs, can display (but not edit) Microsoft Word and Excel files, or use one of its own templates.

Let’s say you’re working with a fellow web worker, kicking around ideas for a redesign of a web site. You could go back and forth in email or IM, but how do you keep all those collaborative bits together? With Lunarr, you just flip to the back side of that URL, email invite your colleague, and Lunarr manages the back and forth for you.

“The front page can be anything, we tried to make it very flexible,” said Hideshi Hamaguchi, COO of Lunarr. “You add a back page you can flip to where you can send that page to a friend and say ‘Oh, this is great web site, so why don’t we use this?’ or whatever. For instance, you can use a Google calendar with your team, and you can flip, and send a message to your team, ‘I’d like to have a meeting on this date, but it looks very bad. Can we free up some time?”

For the rest of 2008 Lunarr is free; Lunarr will begin offering a commercial version for somewhere around $10/month in early 2009, with an enterprise version soon after.

Lunarr is all about the collaboration that goes on around a document or web page, rather than collaborating inside that page – if much of your daily web work revolves around discussing, approving, supporting and reviewing web pages or files within a group of people who live in their email client, Lunarr is definitely attractive.