Hi fellow HN readers!<p>tl;dr: what about setting up a community blog about technical topics?<p>Sometimes I want to share my experience/knowledge on some subjects, but I don't want to maintain a blog which I'll update only a few time per year. So I was thinking that if some of you are like me we could setup a blog where each of us could share his thoughts on whatever he want as long it remains topics that may interest HN readers. Moreover if the quality of the posts is great we may have more visibility (what's the point of writing if nobody read it?) than if each of us as his own blog lost in some dark corner of the Internet.<p>Want to tell everybody why (vim|emacs) is awesome? Want to show us your nifty new demo in (HTML5|CSS3|WebGL)? Want explain some IOCCC entries? Want to talk about internals of the Linux kernel? Rails advanced topics? Python metaclasses? Lexing and parsing? Node? Something else? It's ok, c'mon guys I'm pretty sure we can do something together! We just have to use Hyde/Jekyll and setup a repo on Github. It'll allow us to submit new articles (via pullrequest, and discuss them before publishing them), and to fix already published articles (by submitting an issue/pullrequest).<p>What do you think about it? Would you be interested in a such project? Another questions? Just drop a comment!
Isn't this what an aggregation like HN is in practice?<p>Although getting knowledge transfer from people without blogs is a good point. But, in that case, I think a simple Wordpress setup would be better than running from a git repository. I think we tend to overlook git as the barrier of entry that it is.<p>What gives HN its value is that it's already curated, so if you decide to do this, I think there needs to be a voting system to help give weight to particularly good points.<p>I could see this turning into too much of a directionless, superfluous stack of tech posts, though.
This is a great idea, but a lot of thought needs to be put into how it could be abused. Some potential problems that come to mind immediately are: self-promotion, low quality posts, SEO shenanigans, and wikipedia style edit wars.<p>What keeps HN relevant and high-quality is the flagging and voting system, and I don't know how that translates to a git-based architecture.<p>EDIT: I misunderstood how github's pull requests work. Sounds like a perfect tool to maintain community standards.
Sounds like a good idea. If you execute it, I hope you'll give some careful thought to hierarchy/organization/browsability. It'd be nice to have a community knowledge base that could be an alternative to the declarative/referential tone of a wiki. Well organized blogging could probably be a valuable artifact.
Random, half-baked thought:<p>Set up a blog with 10 participants. Each person writes/curates for 1-3 days and then hands on responsibility. Any AdSense revenue from the site is split by randomly displaying account holder AdSense IDs. A contributor must complete one cycle before their ID joins the ad display pool.<p>Motivation for writing is enforced to some degree by swapping out a writer if they fail to contribute during their period of responsibility for the blog.<p>Encourage writers to queue up ideas or entries to cover for being stumped or busy when their time comes.
Sounds brilliant.<p>I'm a student, so I don't have enough time (and probably don't know enough) to maintain my own blog, but I would love to write an article or two once in a while.<p>Also, discussing articles with other contributors before publication sounds like a great way for me to improve my own writing quality--it's like free editing.<p>What do you (and other interested people) think the minimum number of contributors is? How many people would make something like this both interesting and lasting (e.g. people continue publishing posts in the far future)?
Would love to contribute to the design. Can also offer UI/UX skills, sitemaps, wireframes etc.
<a href="http://www.andrew-rose.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.andrew-rose.com</a>
I'm for it :D. I've tried maintaining a blog a couple times but never end up writing enough, and as you said therefore no one reads the few things I do manage to write up :P.
I created a site called learnfrom.it which is coming down tomorrow since i got busy with other stuff. But if you guys want i can put it back up so people can contribute. Aside from being busy it was hard to get people to contribute so if people volunteer i'll keep it up and change the cstegories so its tech focus.<p>Check out the site and let me know
That sounds like planet-aggregation to me, something like planet.ubuntu.com, but could be set up as planet.hackernews.com or something.<p>As I love to read planets, I'm all up for it. I agree to your argument, what's the point of blogging if nobody reads it. And why have 100 blogs rss'ed if you could have them all in one place.
I like it; I do agree that there are many blogs hidden somewhere with gems in them. Meanwhile, when posting on HN, you can use the 'text' inside of the url and write the article in it. It's not nearly the same; but it's tweetable and can get feedback/exposure to the community.
I currently write an article or two every now and then over at <a href="http://tech.navarr.me/" rel="nofollow">http://tech.navarr.me/</a>. I'd love to work on a more collaborative project, where I can write every now and then and not be part of a dead corner of the net.
Coincidentally, I had such an idea for a long time and have started writing an application for such a blog in my spare time.
But my blog isnt just for the tech community.
Will do a "Show HN" soon, when I have a working site.<p>But would be nice to see a github hosted version.
Love the idea. You should talk to the guys at kapost.com. They're a platform for group blogging and have lots of the features you'd want for managing a bunch of different editors on one blog.