Write for Wired. (c’mon, everybody is doing it.)

I don’t know if my lame little change will make the final cut, but 15 minutes of my time — most of it getting a SocialText account — gives me a shot at being listed in Wired News. The two entities are teaming up to try their hand at communal writing, with the final version (barring disaster) running on September 7th.

The original version of the article, written by Wired’s Ryan Singel, was 1,059 words long. Hopefully, by the time the deadline hits, it won’t be 5,000 words and obsessed with the details of the many trivial-but-related topics in the

This bears watching for a few reasons. First, it is another chance to see wiki activity inspired by broadcast media. I don’t know how many print papers or television stations might give this project a little soapboax, but it definitely is circulating among blogs. Second, this is a very specific and short-duration project. According to evidence produced by Web Lab with their groundbreaking (but alas, little known) work with discussion forums, that short time commitment should increase the level of user interest and input into the project. Third, this is a battle of sorts between collaborative authorship and top-down editing. I’m almost positive that, good or bad, the comparison will be made between what the paid editors might have done with the original text and what the communal editors (like me) came up with.