Todd Sattersten :: Astronaut Projects :: The More Space Project

What's that other stuff in the feed?

You may get some the author pages in the RSS feed. They are also under construction, and are getting content put in them over the next day or two. I am sure there is some clever way to take them out and just give you the main feed, but I am not that clever. As we get more entries on the main page here, those will roll off the bottom.

The More Space Mantra

There are some guiding principles that I think will help you understand everything we are doing with More Space:

1. It's a book - To create legitimacy, one form of the project had to be a book. Even as more and more things move to 1s and 0s, books still have street cred.
2. It had to be self-published - I think we could have gotten some more credibility if this were put out by a mainstream publisher. The trouble is we would have given up the full color photographs and the power to do the project the way we wanted to. With everyone being a self-published authors that put out content daily, doing the book ourselves again seemed to go better with our story.
3. It's transparent - We are going to share everything with you. We are going to go back and talk about the writing, the editing, the designing and the production. We will be publishing the costs and the sales. The whole point is to share everything we have learned throughout the whole project.
4. It's free - We have decided again to show the more you give away, more will buy it. It works for Seth Godin and Wilco. The essays will be available in HTML, pdf, and mp3. They are being published under a Creative Commons license, giving everyone the ability to share and remix with everyone else.
5. Remember where you came from - This is a catch all for the rest of the project feel. We are bloggers, so of course we have to have a blog (actually, the whole set is run by Movable Type). All of the photos in the book are from iStockPhoto. We managed the project in Basecamp. It is just the idea that we used alot of the great tools and resources that are out there to put this project together.

What's This About Again?

I know. I know. It has been awhile.

I got this idea about 10 months ago. I wanted to see what would happen if you gave blogger more space to develop the ideas they talk about every day. The trouble with weblogs is that they are best for short-form writing. Each entry is normally a couple hundred words containing a single thought--and that thought is normally a response to something someone else is saying.

So, I asked some of my favorite business bloggers to write 5,000 to 10,000 words on a business topic they were interested in. The results are the book and this site.

I think it is also important to remember what people were talking about a year ago. There was alot of talk about the rising of bloggers in societal discourse. ABC News labelled "the blogger" one of their people of the year. The trouble was all the media pundits were calling us "amateurs" and "hacks". There was also alot of talk asking how bloggers where going to make any money writing all this stuff for free. I think the conclusion reached is there is room for everyone, but it really got me thinking.

Getting Back to Things

The More Space Project has been very quiet for the last several months. We have been working hard to get the project complete and ready for the public. You will start hearing more from myself and all the authors over the next month as we get ready to launch the project on Oct. 25th.

So, subscribe to the RSS feed here and we'll get back to a more public discourse about the project.