Well, fair warning, this way lies madness. 
If you don’t need another social network in your life, be careful not to use it for that. It can be quite a time suck.
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Sounds like we’re getting somewhere… I’d better start writing those stories on why we love our asshole cats…
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pfft easy. It’s because they own the internet, our couches, our beds, etc., while we carefully select clothing that looks okay even when covered with their hair.
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looks like I’ve found myself a co-writer!
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You guys aren’t naked?
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Fuggetit. They won’t let me have the user name MyCatSnoresLouderThanIDo
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Look at that banana! Just look at it!
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LOL
Are you volunteering as @thekaz’s and my copy-editor?
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MrsTobinL would be a better pick for that. 
My username will be “Adam Scotts” and my entries will be about men’s rights, Dilbert, and how smart its creator is.
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Well, if you get tired of that, you can always throw in a drawing of an evil dog or a cat or something.
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“you all,” or more familiarly “y’all,” is correct, though I understand the stigma or even just not being in the habit of saying it can be a stumbling block for non 
Yes. Just as BB was a zine back in the day with no expectations of anything beyond just putting their ideas out there, our motivations should be the same. But let’s be real: @waetherman is right, the BBS is where it’s at. It is totally reasonable to assume that there will be some type of recognition for our efforts. Whether it will be anything that can be monetized remains to be seen. My feeling is that chasing success will jinx us. Creating a place where we can rightly shine for our own talent and strength-of-community will be its own reward. I highly suspect that any outward markers of success will flow from that. I mean, all we really have to do is what we mostly do here already, just a bit more focused and proactive.
I’ve been kicking around an idea for content based on my new job at a new restaurant and the nuts-and-bolts reality of what the back-of-the-house actually is, which is well-trod territory in a sense but I feel my perspective is fresh and certainly none of the mass-media depictions are worth a damn. The restaurant is very of-the-moment in its concept (our chefs are super-legit and young-ish, we have some veggies sourced from local farmers, vegan options abound, etc.) I think a lot of it could easily be profiles of my co-workers, though. It’s something I’d like to write, “write what you know” is always a winner, and I think the current food-and-restaurant zeitgeist could maybe even be a hook if we’re lucky (and my writing game is tight enough.)
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Didn’t notice if this was mentioned previously, but is the idea to take advantage of the ability of some of the commenters here to articulate ideas well or is it to replicate the repartee and intelligent discussion of the message boards? Or a little of both?
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Egads that was a chaotic couple of days!
So what’d I miss? We have a plan?
One thing that I just got in the mail a couple of days ago was some big update for Medium Publications (they’re adding lots of features), which are actually looking pretty good for a front page blog and should be pretty easy to break into thematic segments.
A couple of examples are Backchannel, The Nib, and Coffeelicious, but I don’t think anybody’s using the new feature set yet.
Only thing that I don’t like about Medium is the comment components aren’t really segregated into a forum-ish structure which would make some conversations less fun. But this is one of the better comment forums out there.
Combining the two (or a similar blogging platform with the forums here) could work really well. We’d just need to put a discussion pointer there.
As a bonus, if we set something decent up, we could probably swipe a bunch of the last IO9/Giz/etc. holdouts from the Gawker network. They deserve something better too!
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Current debate seems to be about whether we want the blog to be easy and inexpensive to set up, or something eye-catching and professional.
I fall on the “you get what you pay for” end of things. Sure, Tumblr is cheap and easy to set up, but if we want this to actually attract attention from anybody outside of the bbs community, we need to have style. When I’ve written something, I want to be able to post it to Facebook or Twitter, and be proud of both the content and how it’s presented, and if the cost of setting that up is, like the numbers being thrown around, in the low three digits per annum, then I am willing to put up my share of that, or more if I need to.
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That’s why I brought up Medium Pubs. They’re eye catching, professional looking, and free. Their big weakness is on the comment/forum side of thing, and we kind of have that nailed here, right?
Plus if they like your stuff, THEY’LL promote it. My goofy Secrets of Star Wars post got a nice 15K read boost after they promoted it (and I made two neat friends, too!)
Svtble’s okay too, or even wordpress. I’d pick those over Tumblr or one of the more streamy-sites. Medium seems almost ready-made though. (I went on a similar quest last year)
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Here’s the way I see it:
Do I want to read it? Blogspot, Tumblr, etc.
Do I want others to read it? Anything that doesn’t have its own domain won’t fly, at a minimum.
Even my Blogspot blog has been something I’ve been meaning to move. Actually this project is delaying some plans, because I have some perfectly good blogstarter money that I’m willing to drop on this project that I was holding onto for upgrading my current blog. I also have posts I’m holding back for similar reasons. I’m not trying to make it sound like I’m being massively inconvenienced, I can always drop the posts and money later, it’s not a big deal if this doesn’t go down. My point is, I’m invested now, and I’m really eager for this to work. But it’s really like @japhroaig said, we’re at the herding cats stage, and I really want to move beyond that. Not just to hurry up, but because there is no hope for this project otherwise. I would like to see the other positions @japhroaig mentioned filled with at least nominees, and I feel weird doing all the nominating.
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I’m not nominating anybody for anything until I know what each position entails.
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I don’t have anything to add at the moment, I just felt that these points really deserved an echo. ‘Writing well’ is a nice feeling but once you’ve got that down, the real satisfaction is knowing—mainly through feedback—that you’ve expanded someone’s perception and understanding of the world. Achieving this even just once will render mere ‘writing well’ as the self-flagellation that it is.
Okay, I guess I did have one thing to add.
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Are we bound to what we choose? By that I mean, if we, for example, started on Tumblr- and then become hugely popular, we could then migrate to some other system, all the while keeping the URL, yes?
Having been involved with self-hosting Wordpress, I want no more part of that shit show. It requires constant dickering, and I don’t have time for that.
Or, if we’re pooling loot, something like Squarespace? Ideally, anyway, a solution that gets out of the way all allows contributors to spend their time contributing (and not doing admin on the infrastructure).
