Introduction to The Great Slate

One Great Slate

[Slate - a small handheld blackboard-type surface to write on with chalk]

The idea came to me at about 7 in the morning on October 31, 2007 while I was up in the village of Ushguli, Svaneti province, in the Republic of Georgia (Caucasus, former USSR). It's an ancient, watchtower-studded place, the highest village in Europe at c. 2200 m, so maybe the thinner mountain air had something to do with it. Georgia: birthplace of wine, so they say, and of Stalin; once the richest Soviet republic per capita, now somewhere around second poorest, but always the most beautiful; visited as Colchis by Jason and the Argonauts in the misty times of legend. Currently deciding what to do for an encore after its amazing recent Rose Revolution.

I've been blogging for a few months (http://www.geosynchronicity.blogspot.com/), and my new thought was to make a blog which anyone can edit. How? Simply by posting on the blog itself a gmail address and password which are the blog's sign-in portal. Sort of a self-reference thing; recursion, if you like.

Here it is. You can change the title bar, layout, content, anything. Say what you want, in any language. Add photos, drawings, poems, video, surveys, maps, widgets, links. Delete your own and others' content. What will you contribute? What's worth saying on such a public slate, the blog equivalent of a wiki? What will survive the longest? Of course, the people who host this site retain the right to censor as usual, or even to delete the entire blog if they decide it's unworkable to have an unlimited number of users logged in to one place simultaneously. And the blog will have the usual maximum blogspot size, though with its content so capriciously editable it may shrink as well as grow in memory space.

Go for it. Spread the word and let's see what happens.