The first Monday in the new year, I went for a walk and lunch with Doc Searls here in New York. It's always great to see him. Our conversations are at a level I don't get to with anyone else.
An anthem
We talked about a project he was working on with David Weinberger, sort of a reprise to the 1999 classic Cluetrain Manifesto, one of the major anthems of the early blogosphere.
Doc told me that the new project was a set of 121 ideas expressed in a phrase or a sentence, one after the other, numbered. I immediately saw how it fit into a project I have in process, called listicle.io. Lists are great! Why should linkbaiters have all the fun. What about you and me?
Then it hit me square between the eyes, what Doc and Dr Dave had is a listicle.
They had a listicle
I love moon mission projects, esp with smart creative people like these two. A moon mission is has a very specific goal, that you head toward like a crazy fool, and don't notice when you invent new technology along the way, until after it's done. Much of the good work I've done was in that mode.
So I set to work to create the listicle for their new rules.
I think it speaks for itself!
The data is open
It's just a static browser-based JavaScript app. No server.
It runs off a simple JSON list that Doc and Dave edit, save in Dropbox, where my app then reads it when it loads the listicle.
Here's the JSON file. If you want, you too can write a browser for this format! They've made the data available to anyone who wants to play with it. Go forth and render!
And soon I hope to release an editor that makes it easy to create listicles from an outline.