Did it ever happen to you that you were disconnected for some time? Say you commute to work, have some free time in school or just lay on the beach? What do people usually do in these situations? Usually they read.
Usually, they read books or newspapers. There are lots of books and there is a fair lot of good books, but there are times where you don’t want to read books, maybe because you don’t have enough time to dig into the book or because the book is too heavy to take with you or just don’t want to read books… which leaves newspapers.
However, the amount of things I actually want to read in newspapers is constantly fading (YMMV, but I certainly notice it for myself). On the other hand, there are so many interesting essays and blog posts on the net, but unavailable in these situations. In fact, some blog entries are so good, they even get published as books.
I’d really like to read something like these posts regularily. Of course, that won’t work for all kind of posts, especially not for the ones that are mere link propagation or otherwise depend on the web too heavily. But I still think there is enough readworthy writing on the web, and it would be nice to read that offline too.
It could work about like that… the editorial staff of the “blogpaper” greps the net work for things that are printworthy and ask the authors if they want their posts published (maybe even for a bit of money) and they will arrange it (layout it properly etc.) for printing. Alternatively, A-level bloggers could write exclusive content for the blogpaper, and later publish it on their own sites. (Or even at the same time, but such things of course encourage to actually buy the thing.) As usual, the content will be categorized into topics like “politics”, “geekery”, “short cuts” and “diary”, or whatever is appropriate. Then, the editorial staff adds some illustrations, maybe a crossword puzzle and a sudoku and off it goes to the printing press.
I don’t think it could be too much work to make such a magazine appear, say, weekly or even only semi-weekly. I for one would really like to read it; there are enough situations where you don’t have net access but still want to read “something interesting”.
NP: Dan Bern—Hannibal