Another Letter.

This is from an email I sent around. Thought I’d try one more time.

Dear friends and acquaintances,

I own and pay for a vastly underutilized web domain called stupididea.com. It has resources to host many more images, a tremendous amount of text, perhaps some video. The following is the SHORT PITCH:

You may find of interest the following resources:

THE LONG PITCH:

Stupididea.com’s original concept centered around the wiki at
http://www.stupididea.com/mediawiki/ (running the same software as Wikipedia), where the plan was to accumulate “stupid ideas” and through debate and collaborative editing improve them to the point of being standalone white paper proposals. Later, I found that this concept has been well-implemented at halfbakery.com and shouldexist.org. I still work on my own stupid ideas, and invite others to do so, but I would like to open up the wiki to any kind of collaborative project/publication. For those who don’t know, the first principle of wiki publication is “be bold”, meaning don’t bother to ask permission first, only be considerate to other people’s work.

Everyone on this initial mailing is a Johnny, and the intention is for this to be a low-volume site, focusing on the specialized, esoteric, cult-like discourses and interests we all know and love. Making the wiki a more interesting place to visit would be a good use of the bandwidth, but I am eager to provide other services that people would find useful or gratifying. In particular, I can set you up with one of those weblogs you all have been hearing so much about (I can also install any open source web software that requires PHP and MySQL—search freshmeat.net). Some other ideas:

  • A listserv with a circumscribed, non-mailbox-clogging purpose (for example, as an expert knowledge query server: “Hey, what exactly is the deal with Boethius?”, “What things should I lie about on a law school application?”)
  • A bulletin board (forum)
  • A webzine publication (my suggestion: “The New Good: Culture and Ethics”)
  • An open-access photo gallery (ala http://www.flickr.com)
  • Your idea here
    —[Method]

    P.S. The only area where I intend to exercise a heavy editorial hand is in disallowing certain subjects that are amply served elsewhere on the Internet. This relates specifically to anime (but not to g-novels).

    I should be more explicit: if people would like their own web space (under a cool domain name, not you.bloggoober.com), would like to serve up their own media files (within reason), want space to start a project, just contact me at my email at the bottom of the page. I’ll give you ftp access and will help out with technical things.

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