Orwell contest: My friend Charlie Bird and I have been working on a Faux Orwell contest, much like the Faux Faulkner and Imitation Hemingway ones held each year. Contestants will submit a 500 word piece written in Orwell's style on Orwellian themes. We are assembling a panel of Orwell experts to judge. I am very excited about the possibilities for seeing some hilarious parodies. The contest should kick off in the next few days--I'll post the link here when it starts.

Beyond blogging: An alternative to blogging is Wiki, a collaborative way to create indexed content on one site. TWiki is a good example of this--they seem to offer the easiest and most powerful Wiki around, simple to get started with but extremely extensible. I would like to build a George Orwell Encyclopedia online and this looks like the best way to do it--put up the wiki, properly formatted, and get the community involved in adding pages. A few reasons to do this: build a permanent memory for the Orwell community, one a bit more organized than the archives of alt.books.george-orwell; give students a place to go for answers to Orwell questions; try to become the primary Orwell reference on Google. This third reason exites me the most--it is an experiment in implementing "Tipping Point" concepts. It can only get recognized (and stay recognized) if the content is sticky and it gets noticed by mavens and connectors. Seems like a worthwhile experiment.

Web makes a small world: I maintain a website of George Orwell-related photographs, including a page on Percy Street in London. Now I've just had email from a new resident of Percy Street who came across the page and is thankful for knowing a bit of the history of his building. Google is linking more than web pages here.

Blogging analysis: Andrew Sullivan points this morning to articles from Microcontent News. The author, John Hiler, makes several good arguments about blogging's effect on how issues are injected into the mainstream media, in particular how it relates to Google and The Tipping Point.

15th Ave NW Planning: The Whittier Heights Community Council just received a neighborhood grant from the city to study improvements to 15th Ave NW between 65th and 87th Streets. We will get community input, hire a design firm to shape that into proposals for pedestrian and other improvements to 15th, and present results for review later in the summer. The proposal mandated studying the corridor with and without monorail, so we will be prepared no matter what the outcome of the referendum this November. The final study will be entered as an addendum to the Ballard community plan.

Neighborhood grants match money from the community, so Whittier Heights will need to contribute to make this project work. Time volunteered also counts as a contribution at $12.50/hour, so anyone who wants to help by donating time (either at a community discussion, or otherwise), should contact Marianne Scholl at mscholl2@earthlink.net.

Monorail Costs and Revenues: The ETC has a projection of costs and revenues for operating the monorail. These show that it is possible to run the monorail without subsidy if advertising and event revenue are managed well and costs are contained. Please let the monorail board know you would like the system to run unsubsidized; you can give feedback here.

Again with the monrail: Yesterday being the first Monday of the month, there was another board meeting of the ETC, progressing along on the Seattle monorail. Some highlights:

• Senate Bill 6464 is moving through the legislature very quickly. This is the bill that grants municipalities the power to raise money for public transport systems and is required before the monorail could even be voted on. It passed the Senate and last night passed the House transportation committee on a strong 20-2 vote. Next hurdles are the rules committee and the full House--presumable Govenor Locke will sign it if it reaches him.
  
• A list of design guidelines is being prepared. Currently this in only in text form, so it is little help to citizens wanting to understand how the monorail would actually look. Joel Horn mentioned that there is a group at the University of Washington working on producing illustrations from the guidelines--I would very much like to see the results.
  
• Preliminary revenue and operation cost projections were presented. From these, I'm guessing that the board will ultimately not ask the voters for a subsidy for operating the monorail, or for a small subsidy that is phased out after a few years. I hope these projections turn out to be accurate: a monorail with operating self-sufficiency would be morally equivalent of roadways, in that the infrastructure is paid for by the state, but the users pay themselves for the usage.
  

15th Ave NW Trees: The city planted 40 trees this morning on 15th Ave NW between 80th and 85th Streets. The volunteer turnout to help them was much greater than expected, so all the trees were planted in an hour--I estimate 30 people must have been there. Even this small amount of work has created a change for the better along 15th; the trees create a visual break between the street and the sidewalk and make you feel sheltered as you walk along the street, even though the physical barrier created is negligable. The next set of trees, between 75th and 80th, is scheduled to go in April 20th. I'll post an announcement when that date gets closer.

More monorail stuff: After the tree planting, a few of us stood around talking about the monorail and its effect on the 15th Ave corridor. The consensus was that we need more information from the ETC board about their plans for parking and rerouting telephone wires before we can endorse running the monorail up 15th. Another concern is the height of the track going over the ship canal--it if truly going to be 125 feet above the water, it will need to be 60 feet up at Market St., which would make for a dizzying station height. I committed to calling the ETC staff to get more information.

We also found out that our own Bill Bryant, Loyal Heights resident who works for Metro, is the Metro coordinator with the monorail. He can be contacted at bill.bryant@metrokc.gov if you have questions about plans for the monorail to interact with the bus system.

The next ETC board meeting is the Monday, March 4th in the City Council Chambers. More information, including agenda, here.

The Stranger is 10: Just surfed over to The Stranger and saw that they are now ten years old. When I first moved to Seattle in September of 1991, there were these odd little stickers all over the U-District, showing a bald guy looking off into the distance. "The Stranger is coming." It produced quite a bit of anticipation. Ten years later, The Stranger has become by far the best Seattle newspaper, being much more thorough than the Times or the P-I, and much more open about its biases than the Weekly.

Speaking of The Stranger: Pat Kearney has a good review of SB 6464 in the latest issue. This bill is needed to give Seattle voters the authority to fund the monorail, but gives the city council power to amend the monorail plan once passed by the voters. This is a bad idea: the council has tried before to kill the monorail and should not be allowed another chance to interfere. If the ETC can sell the idea to the voters, they should be allowed to build the monorail, and having council oversight will just make the process that more expensive. Write to Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles about the issue. Not only is she in the state senate, but was recently appointed to the monorail board, too.