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

Allow researches to e-mail new entries to the Guide from wherever they happen to be, instead of (like now) having to log onto the BBC website to add entries. Some of us like to compose off-line because we don't have a dedicated Internet connection.

Some of us have been composing entries offline and then uploading them for a few years, even though we do have a dedicated internet connection.

And in fact, we actively encourage people to write their entries offline first, as it helps with collating facts and spell-checking. But it's much betetr to upload the entry via your own account so that it retains your own credit.

It also means the in-house staff don't have to do the kind of tasks Researchers can already do themselves.

It seems I didn't make myself clear. I didn't mean uploading off-line composed entries; I meant actually e-mailing entries to the Guide for inclusion in the Guide. For example, the Subject line of the e-mail message could be the title of the Guide entry and the body of the e-mail message could be the Guide entry itself. I would then send the e-mail message to, for example, [email protected], and have it appear in the Guide, without having to open a browser and surf over to the BBC's website. (Blogger.com allows blogs to be updated by e-mail in this way.)

Wouldn't that leave us wide open to Spam attacks though?

Most of my junk e-mail is composed in HTML or has a URL in the body of the msg - wouldn't it be easy to automatically filter those out?

BUT, I'm not a tech person; I just come up with bizarre ideas, I don't think about if or how they can be implemented. I just find it very nice, convenient and an organisational boon to be able to e-mail my diary entries to blogger without logging onto their site.

Pah, ya lazy thing!

Actually, joking aside, although we don't want to make things needlessly complicated, we do actually like that there's a degree of effort required to participate here. It means that there's never a chance you're talking to a robot; even our own automated messages are generated by someone clicking a button manually, so you know there's a human somewhere behind there.

It's not something we're currently developing, but in the future there may be ways to post messages from your mobile or PDA. A few companies have successfully developed mobile devices capable of using cookies, which is what currently prevents us from being able to offer a full h2g2 experience on mobile.

Keep up the brainstorming though. Even if it's not possible, it's worth thinking about these things every now and then.

Also if entries were emailed then how would we be able to review them etc? A few major flaws in this thinking me...thinks

Never mind though, ideas are nothing unless shared.

Kat

I like working off-line and then uploading mine in code, you have more control over the appearance of your article if you do it yourself and guideml it yourself. Blogs are usually statements of feelings or stuff done that day, not detailed, researched articles with references etc. Most researchers would prefer (I would guess) to retain ownership of their hard work, rather than email it to someone who will then update it in their own way instead.