Ever get tired of high-volume, low-quality news? Surely everyone does: you open up your news aggregator every day, then manually sort through the 90% or more dross left as a consequence of Sturgeon's Law just to find something that you're really interested in. Sites are starting to get a little smarter at offering what you want—Google News lets you put custom news searches on their news page, and weblogs allow you to catch up on specific friends' activities—but a huge part of the problem is that common media is generally just churned out as a low-grade commodity.
So Terje Bless writes about a new site that he has in mind, a site which by its very nature would provide a focal point for high quality news items, reversing the trend of low-grade crap. The general tenets are: i) the field doesn't actually matter as much as people think it does, as long as the material is both well investigated and well presented; ii) it's the people reporting that matter, and the people will naturally congregate around certain subject areas anyway; iii) it's the quality of the output, not the quantity, that matters. And point three gives rise to the name of Blue Moon, and the particulars that Terje goes into in his article as linked above.
I'm not particularly concerned about the technical workings at the moment; I'm looking for large societal backing. So I'm mainly looking at you, Kevin Reid, you, John Cowan, and all the other great people I know to be reading; but if anyone is interested in the ideas expressed herein, we'd like to hear from you too. Either leave a comment on this post, or visit the swhack IRC channel.
It's the Oxyrhynchus story previously covered here on miscoranda that set this into gear, but really anything could have done it. In fact, Terje was musing just a few months ago whether he "could persuade sbp to run an 'Etymology/Source/Trivia of The Day' blog for all the wonderful nuggets that get alluded to on Miscoranda..." From that nudge, I started writing a post about guillemets which I haven't yet finished, but the principle has been carried through to Blue Moon.
Blue Moon would combine the best aspects of wikis, weblogs, periodicals, and ezines by stealing editability from wikis, ease of posting from weblogs, identity and careful composition from periodicals, and the wide distribution in various formats from zines that weblogs are slowly starting to make redundant. If there is critical mass of a group of people dedicated to interesting linguistics and computer science trivia, why shouldn't we package up what we're discussing on a day to day basis in a more public-friendly format, and then cherry pick the best parts for a single site?
If there's one thing I've learned from TNS, miscoranda, eph, numerous wiki installations, &c., it's not the technology behind it that counts, it's the amount of interest there is and the volition of the publisher or publishers to keep coming up with good material. John Cowan still writes many wonderful stories on IRC that wouldn't go amiss on his weblog, and Kevin Reid went from December to April without posting in his—worse than me! But the community feeling of sharing anecdotes is such that we'll talk endlessly about such topics on IRC, and Terje seems to be wondering (and I'm certainly wondering) why we can't translate that to a more static showcase that others will more easily be able to enjoy on a periodic basis than trawling through thousands of lines of logged conversation.
A blue moon can mean many things, but most commonly it's taken to be the third full moon in a season, or the second full moon in a month. It was first used in 1528, according to Wikipedia, and we all know the great Rodgers and Hart composition as sung by Billie Holiday of course. I don't really expect that we'll get the levels of involvement required for such a project to succeed, but I think the idea is certainly worth pitching out there just in case it does make it happen.