PsiPog.net

I'm still programming away at the new PsiPog. Let's go over the basic features of the new PsiPog, and then go into what it's potential is:

The new PsiPog is focused on sharing personal experience and ideas. It's focused on teaching people how to analyze their personal experiences better, and then teaches people how to teach. I want to encourage people to have healthy skepticism, research things scientifically and intelligently, analyze their personal experiences, and then communicate what's going on clearly to everyone else in the community. These ideals have driven the new design and creation of tools to help members make this happen.

The biggest change is that I'm allowing any member to publish their own articles. This might seem crazy at first... but only because you aren't in my shoes. The way PsiPog has worked over the past years is that all article submissions go through me. I read them, provide the author with one on one advice, and eventually they pound out an article that I think kicks ass... and I put it online. It's a great system, except for one thing: it takes a shit load of effort for me to coach every author on every article they want to post. I get a lot of submissions of pretty decent articles that have the potential to turn into really kick ass ones - but I don't want to take the time to coach every author one on one to teach them to write correctly and clairfy their thoughts. It's easy when you have a handful of authors... but when you start getting into a few dozen authors, it's impossible for me to do it.

I see a lot of great articles being submitted, but I don't have the time/patience to train the authors one on one. So I know that a lot of great authors are out there, but the bottleneck is on me. People read the articles, have great ideas, experience cool things, want to share - then they get to me, and I can't handle the demand. So no articles get posted. What a waste!

Now, once I give the power to publish in the hands of the member, that simplifies a lot on my end. Articles no longer bottleneck at me, and they flow freely to the website, and propogate throughout the community. That's good! (Of course, we need some controls in place so that fluffy information doesn't spread, but I'm confident we can nail that problem).

This new idea will need a lot of new code to be written to support it. So, while I'm recoding a lot of things, I can use this to take advantage of another faulty aspect of PsiPog: terrible data structures. To understand this, you'll have to understand some basic programming concepts. The main thing is that the way information is stored on the PsiPog server is very isolated and buggy. The new idea I have for storing the information is the opposite: integrated and clean. What does this mean? This means that once I have the article system up and running, it takes little effort to create a mailbox system. And little effort to create a psi journal system. And little effort to create a message board system. All of these core features were considered when creating the new data structures, so they all function together very smoothly and elegantly.

This also means that the search function will be USEFUL. In the new system, you can plug in something like "psi ball", and the search will quickly return all the articles, drafts, forum posts, Q&A, public journals, and your personal mail that contain that phrase. So if Jimmy Bob wrote in his journal about his first experience with psi balls two years ago, and chose to make his journal public, you can see his journal entry. And if Sammy Dudeman wrote an article on how to make a psi ball using his own custom technique two days ago, you can pull that up from the search as well.

Ok, so how does this help, and what can we do with this. The technology side will be a wonderful system that is capable of a lot of growth, and easy to use. The next step is to TAKE ADVANTAGE of it to make some real progress.

The next step is to motivate people to be intelligent and use the tools to share information. This comes from shifting our attention. The old PsiPog system had a lot of rules of what NOT to do. I've learned this is a bad way to get people on the same page as you. Instead, I need to communicate what is GOOD to do! What are the ideals? It's not about what we're avoiding - it's about where we're GOING. I could list a million rules of what NOT to do (and I've done so in the past). But the ideals of what to DO are actually a lot simplier.

Ideals like communicating clearly, being logical, being nice, being helpful, being honest, understanding people, having fun, being creative, exploring openly, researching, using credible sources of information, working together, and sharing what you know. If people will jump on board with me to support these ideals, then I know things will kick ass.

On top of this, what creative ways can we use this technology to do some fun things? Regular practices, regular online seminars, interviews with experienced people, online psi games, online PK Parties, online Flare Parties, lottery predictions, book reviews, explaining modern science in easy to understand ways, teaching CORRECT statistical analysis, sharing videos (especially with video.google.com technology), and who knows what else. The new backend will allow for anyone to have the ability to post information on whatever interests them. It will allow me to quickly publish articles of my own, and share my own experiments.

There is a lot of potential for it. And it's the technological aspect is being written right now. It's exciting :-).

~Sean