Idea for post-literate.com
posted by McFrozen on December 21, 2001
Funny that we've had a few posts about books and music today. I worked on this last night. It's kind of long, but please read it and comment if you have time. I'm going to keep this entry at the top of the page for a few days to make sure that it's available over the weekend and next week.
First, thanks to everyone for playing along on GerPunx.
I would really like to do something with post-literate.com. gerpunx is fun and I don't want that to go away, but post-literate is a good name and we're all smart folks. I think we can do something cool. Here's what I'm thinking so far. Sort of a zine thing, like so many other sites, but it would be ours.
- Reviews
Lots of reviews. Like http://www.medianugget.com/, but not exactly. Potentially longer reviews, and not necessarily daily. We'd probably want to keep the number of categories small and reasonable at the beginning and then decide as we go forward how to grow it.
I'm thinking music, film, print, and tv to start. Looking at medianugget, they also have a 'computer' category. Would you guys like that? What about a wildcard category?
Everyone would do at least one or two reviews a month. Of anything. Out of print, vinyl, advertisements, whatever. Long, short, verbose. They don't even have to be "reviews" in the sense of "this is good/bad because of artistic merit/lack thereof". It could be just "Hey, I found this and it's cool."
What about comments? My inclination would be no comments on reviews, but we could leave that up to each reviewer's discretion.
If we all agree to link the reviewed item to Amazon (provided they sell it), we could use their Associates program to generate a few pennies either for charity or to help pay the server costs for post-literate.com
For now, this would be the core of post-literate.com.
- Personal blogs
Anyone in the crew who wants one can have a blog on post-literate.com, once I get Movable Type set up. It'll support mulitple blogs and they don't take up much room. This would be another fairly simple piece to get going once with the current folks (if any of them are interested).
I would be glad to help with some basic templates.
- Writing
I can't decide whether this should be split up into two separate sections or not (Fiction and other). I think I'd want to start with just "writing" and have subsections for types (fiction, non-fiction, essay) like we would for the reviews.
- Photos/Art/Design
I'm not sure about how to implement this one, but I'm kind of thinking some sort of "gallery" space, where a person can "hang" a new show, whether it's one picture/piece or dozens. Pictures, audio, Flash, Quicktime, whatever.
That's all I have for right now.
I can get 1 and 2 set up next week during the break. They're fairly simple. 3 and 4 will require some more discussion and may not be feasible for a few months.
All of my ideas would probably require adding people to the crew, so at some point we need to decide how we're going to do that. Nominations? Volunteers? Friends only? Group approval or if someone nominates a friend, they're allowed in? Minimum required contribution (so that if we have a slacker, we can boot him or her in favor of someone more productive) or just let the chips fall and if we need someone to pitch in, find someone and bring 'em in?
I don't want to have so many that we can't keep track of who's who, but I'd like to have enough that at any given time there would be something new on the site without having to resort to assignments and deadlines. That would make it not fun. Maybe 10 or 15 people?
If you're not interested in getting in on the planning/brainstorming, that's cool, too. I want this to be a group project, but if you don't have time or interest in the planning part, then keep posting to Gerpunx as you have time, and when we get the Post-Literate functioning, then you can join in there, too.
(Oh, yeah. We could make a little mascot and call him "p-litty". HA HA HA HA!" Thank you, thank you!)