I would like a simple web page with a text box like the one I am typing in now, that I can type in, hit "Enter" and have what I typed show up on the Web with its own webpage. That would be what I would call open access - free speech. All this MySpace/Blogspot s is for the birds. Google Page Creator is a step in the right direction but of course it is closed to new accounts until the singularity because of high demand. How hard can it be to give people a page with nothing on it but an empty text box, a "send" button and... OK a box on the lower right for advertisements to pay for the whole thing.-- JesusHChrist, Apr 06 2006 everything2 http://www.everythi...=E2%20Quick%20StartThis site has been around, oh, almost a decade now. Aside from their rather fascist editing policy, and the added twist of automatic node-linking, it's basically what you describe. [fenn, Apr 07 2006] The web site you described is launched. 5 seconds later, you reload and watch in horror as you browser crashed under the weight of a page with about the same amount of characters as digits in pi (I oringinally typed the symbol in, but it came up as π).
Seriously, this would be inundated with adverts and crap so fast you wouldn't be able to say 'Bone'.
A myriad of blogs and webpages already allow you to say what you want. The internet already has free speech (unless you're in China, or you have one of Websense and Co.).-- dbmag9, Apr 06 2006 I teach computer classes to seniors and people with disabilities and my students do not have an easy time figuring out how to publish online.-- JesusHChrist, Apr 06 2006 +-- zeno, Apr 06 2006 Haven't we done this before?
I hear your frustration, but I don't think you fully appreciate what it takes to host user-edited content. How do you protect these user-created texts from change by others? Does your system have accounts? How are they managed?-- jutta, Apr 06 2006 yeah, i remember doing this before w/ JHC, and I have the same thing to say...
The bar is already extremely low to get things on the web. Any lower, and the quality would go down even more.
Who's going to read this? You may as well tell your seniors to write on napkins and tape them on a lamppost. Just posting content is not communication unless you can get an audience.-- sophocles, Apr 06 2006 The World Wide JHChweb would have no caps, no bold, no graphics, no italics, no Flash, only links and text (and targeted ads in the top right corner). No accounts. Everytime you go to JHChweb.com, enter text and hit "Send" it would create a new permanent JHChwebpage that could not be added to or edited, only linked to or not linked to. Then search engines could provide access to these pages according to their textual content and the number of times they are linked to.-- JesusHChrist, Apr 07 2006 Oh! Now that you've explained it more I think that's a really interesting concept.
It wouldn't require hosting on the part of the destination site; just rendering. The destination site would just render whatever text is passed to it. The form that you type into just redirects to a rendering URL with the text as an argument.
User types into form: Hello! Site redirects to: http://foo.org/Hello%21 Visitor to http://foo.org/Hello%21 sees: Hello!
I'm guessing keeping URLs below 256 characters is a good idea. So it's not quite free speech, more free SMS messages. But, hey.
The result URLs could be automatically routed through tinyurl or similar. (Essentially, using tinyurl as the file store.) If you're routing things through tinyurl from within the server, you can store larger texts in multiple layers of tinyurl-compressed data. Up to a point.
Advertisers generally don't like ads on free speech. (They don't want to be associated with, say, the local Nazi headquarters or violent porn.) So, I'm not sure how this would make money in the real world. But it's a good concept, and ridiculously easy to implement. Art project, anyone?-- jutta, Apr 07 2006 Just tell your friends to go to about:[whatever you want]. Easy, and it's already there. See linky.
Sorry about the previous comment, I assumed you meant one page, which anyone could add too.
EDIT: I couldn't get this to work, so no linky.-- dbmag9, Apr 07 2006 random, halfbakery