One_Great_Slate

Sword8 Signing On

2007-11-19T00:24:00.000-08:00

What a gr8 idea ! Hope to be a regular contributor. What comes to mind when I read - or hear - the word "slate" are the uses that material is put to. Particularly amazing are the slate shingles used for roofing which we saw a lot of throught UK when we travelled there. We even visited a slate mine in Wales - a fascinating tour - and still have some pieces of Welsh slate picked up at that site. (Not sure where they are right now as we are still unpacking after moving house recently.) And of course the huge slabs of slate used for the surface of snooker and pool tables. Quite a task moving those pieces of furniture when they have to be. Until next time ......

It's Your Turn.

2007-11-15T20:45:00.000-08:00

This blog is getting a few visitors, but so far the real purpose of it isn't being tapped at all: anyone can edit it, in any way. Add, subtract, change. Do none of you have anything important to say, or simply want to introduce yourselves? Are you all too busy? (That I can believe, at least in the Western world.) So far the grand experiment is waiting to be jump-started.

CONTRIBUTE SOMETHING!

Sign out, sign in

2007-11-06T20:42:00.000-08:00

NB For those of you who have an existing gmail account and/or blogger or blogspot blog, you'll have to sign out of those before signing in to this blog with its gmail address and password.

The Maker

Introduction to The Great Slate

2007-11-04T21:42:00.000-08:00

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.