h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

H2G2 has in many ways revived my interest in writing, but every now and again I just want to have a good rant about something. Opinion pieces are not normally suitable for the EG or Underguide.

I envisage a PR-style page where anyone can submit entries and others can tag on discussions. Don't know what this kind of setup would be called unfortunately.

I'm sure a spleen-venting forum would go down well with other researchers and would inspire some lively, if not entirely serious, debate.

Is this a sensible idea? If so, how do I go about setting one up?

Traveller in Time waiting for next Quik
"Read < <./>ThePost</.> >

Or even write for it ."

So your own journal isn't good enough because you want other people's rants too. You could form a network with people linking to each other's entries (a bit like other blog networks, eg tangled bank, rather than a collective blog). There's the <./>Community-Soapbox</.> for a more open area where people already rant but things would not be directly interconnected and would be mixed with quite different topics - mostly site-related!

There's already "The Forum" club page ( A1146917 ). You could start a similar, but more ranty, pub/club/society page. To some extent the whole of the ican/actionnetwork sub-site ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/ ) is for rants with discussions attached - but with the aim being to get beyond the rant stage to actually doing something.

There are of course all the message-boards which have now been migrated over to dna. The most obvious political public affairs ranty one is probably "Today", http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbtoday/ , but there's also long been a points-of-view one primarily for broadcast material.