SecretPlans.org

How does the project strike you as a template, then? What other topics seem especially well-suited to the cliquesourced, refractory, penumbral anthologizing?

If anything, I think that you want to think less about topic and more about contributors. If you want interesting refractions, you focus on more choosing cool prisms, than on controlling the light that’ll pass through.

As to topics, anything that’s been around for awhile, anything that’s got a lot of facets. If I had to guess I’d say that smaller topics would generate a better result than larger ones. Helvetica was so much better than Objectified for this reason, and it’s what’s so great about James Burke’s Connections series. You take something that seems deceptively simple and then you start examining it closer and closer and as you do it opens out into a history of the world.

Lately I’ve been really interested in projects that end. So many blogs and projects start out with the hope that they’ll become a new institution or something. Inevitably most die, so when you stumble across them, your first impression is of three posts on the front page apologizing for not posting much, with months in between. Buried in the archives, is gold.

Far better for a project that ends strong, which means that you have to plan for it to come to an end. You have to stop even if there is good stuff in the pipeline. This is painful to do, but it’s worth it.

It’s worth it because it frees up your attention to work on the next project, because it gives contributors to this project a clear deadline and commitment, because it promises your audience that there’s an upper limit to how much of their attention you will ask for, and because it leaves behind something that looks good long after the thing is finished.

I endorse everything about this vision of content production.

(Source: hilobrow.com)