We’re in a knowledge economy now, so I’m told. Unfortunately, capitalising on knowledge can be hard. Just because you know exactly how many episodes of the Simpsons each and every periphery character appears in, doesn’t mean that it’s going to earn you any money. Similarly, being able to list the ten most common colours that cars from 1993 were bought in isn’t going to pay for that swimming pool you hanker after.

A new website intends to change all that by becoming a kind of eBay for information. Just as the original auction site allowed you to turn the old junk clogging up your attic into cash, Doxmart will let you flog all those Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, images, videos, thoughts and ideas that fill up your brain and hard disk.

The idea is that you create an account and upload a file, whatever it may be, tagging it well. Then, the next time that someone needs that exact collection of arbitrary data, they may choose to pay a small fee for it rather than spend a few hours researching it themselves. You keep most of this money, Doxmart takes a little, and everyone wins.

It’s a wonderful idea – transcribing the knowledge that you’ve spent years collecting into an easily consumable digital package, and spending the rest of your life comfortably living off of the revenue. The reality of this depends entirely of the worth of the knowledge you have stored up there. Experts in highly advanced and specialised fields may well make a mint, whereas that Simpsons knowledge may struggle to earn you enough to buy a pint once a year. Only time will tell, once the site emerges in a Beta state in September.

One interesting aspect is that if you refer users you get to take 4% of the revenue from their documents – out of Doxmart’s share – forever. That means that if a cure for the common cold, award-winning novel, best-selling album or scandalous photograph of Gordon Brown is uploaded by someone following this link, I can retire early.