Monday, February 05, 2007

Zeno's Paradox

I've started something called a "Writeboard". An online document system sort of like GoogleDocs. It offers the opportunity for collaboration, editing, revising, all online. I've given it the title: Zeno's Paradox. And here's what I wrote for the first entry:

God, I hope I got this right. Zeno’s Paradox…this is the one that says you can never actually catch up to something. In a race, if you make up half the distance, you still have another half. If you make up half of that, there’s still more. And more. You can never complete the distance, because there’s inevitably still some space to go.

Zeno’s Paradox. I’m pretty sure that’s it.

Like writing, which is what we’ll do here. No actual completion? Maybe. A collaborative effort (with edits). Start a story. Continue a story. See if we can get halfway.

My idea is this: to write collaboratively with anyone who's interested. Or to create a serial story. Or something. It's not a fully-formed idea yet. But I remember those writing exercises where you would have the page folded over and not know exactly what was previously written. Sort of like that, except in this case you would know. You can edit, add, revise, see previous versions, lots of stuff. You can even subscribe via RSS so that you'll know when someone has added or made changes.

It works like this: you need a password to get on to the board. If you send me an email (which is available by clicking on my profile) I can send you an invitation which will include the URL and the password.

Oh, I forgot to mention, you need to be running Internet Explorer 6, Safari, or Firefox to get on this board. Explorer 5 doesn't work.

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Help! I've written and I can't get up!