I’ve been working on a side project since early last year and it’s finally ready for the big time, so I thought I’d share it with you.

It’s called TypeFront, and it’s a font distribution platform that leverages downloadable font support in browsers to serve fonts to the web sites that you choose.

Last year, the W3C and the browser makers finally got together to make something beautiful happen - downloadable font support in the CSS3 specification and an implementation of this in the latest versions of all the major browsers. Suddenly you could refer to a font file through your standards-compliant CSS code and it would be correctly downloaded and displayed in over 90% of the browsers out there.

Finally we could look back on our years of Arial-bondage and laugh.

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What do you think about this idea - create a tool that makes it dead-easy for owners of user content-driven websites to drop-in the ability for users to access detailed analytics about the content that they have created.

I think that narcissistic social media addicts would love the ability to track how popular their postings are on their favourite sites.

Now that Google have released an API for Google Analytics, it would be relatively easy to piggyback off website owners’ existing GA accounts, slice the data up and present the analytics relevant to a particular page or section of the site that your current user is interested in.

Clicking on a ’stats’ link beside any of their posted content could take the user to a page full of funky flash charts illustrating their recent rise to fame. Widgets such as top 10 content and user popularity rankings could be derived from the analytics data and posted on home and profile pages. Users could be alerted by email or IM when their content has just gone viral, then transported to a real-time updating page where they could watch the action unfold.

I think that the sell to website owners would be pretty easy - they stand to increase user engagement and frequency of visits to their site, and they are giving their most fanatical users exactly what they want - which is always a smart thing to do.

How many RSS feeds do you have in your reader?

How many more would you need to add to be on the absolute bleeding-edge of thinking in your field? 50? 100?

How many more people do you need to follow on Twitter?

How long would it take you to read all that content each day?

I can see that the people who strike real success usually do it by a combination of doing their own thing and striking it lucky - not necessarily by following the trends.

I think that there are a lot of people that spend a lot of time staying on the absolute bleeding edge of technology and web business trends, potentially at the cost of creativity and time to commit to developing and improving their own original products.

I think there is value in learning lessons from others and knowing where the market is going - but I think that one of the things that the most successful products have in common is that they all stood up to lead their chosen market in a particular direction at some point.

And you can’t do that until you quit following the established leaders for a second or two.