Follow the passion

Former Poynter commentator Steve Outing has gotten financial backing to launch YourMTB.com, a community site for mountain bikers. Paid Content says Outing’s Enthusiast Group plans similar climbing and running sites that will feature a combination of professional and user-generated articles, photos and features. I generally found Outing’s Poynter commentaries most insightful, such as the five essays I pointed to in this post.

Here’s a wild idea : ask a Swarm of Angels to donate a large sum of money in many small increments to make a mid-budget film. Here’s the why:

“By using the Internet to gather together 50,000 people willing to pay £25 to join an exclusive global online community — The Swarm — the project’s ambition is to make the world’s first Internet-funded, crewed and distributed feature film.”

And the what:

“The genre is likely to be thriller based with soft sci-fi elements. I ( Matt Hanson ?) will write and develop two scripts that the members of The Swarm can then dissect and improve upon (script doctor, and rewrite) via a wiki. They’ll then be a vote on the script to go with … I see ASOA as a benevolent dictatorship.”

This may be out of place but News University offers a mix of free and low cost online training courses on a wide array of topics.