I could probably get it sponsored without too much trouble. Someone offered to sponsor the last one. The issue is that banners and stuff are tacky and commercial.

I think your ideas for Kottu are great, Indi.

The tech could be better and I agree that getting a professional web-standards company to rebuild it is the way forward.

As for events, how about getting sponsorship for a Bloggy Awards event? Surely not out of the realms of possibility? The hard part would of course be getting sponsor(s) interested, but I think the time is right for Kottu to be seen as attractive to advertising companies. You should of course steer clear of placing ads on Kottu itself, but I think a sponsored awards event and/or meetup is viable? The sponsor could publicise the event, give away promotional items and prizes on the day, and get significant coverage across the Kottu blogosphere.

The education idea is great. I’m not clear on exactly what form it would take, but I would love to help someone to improve their English by mentoring their blog. I could commit a few hours a week to this, and I’m sure many others would too.

On marketing, I’ve also thought for a long time that much of the content on Kottu deserves to be in print, to be put out there. Sorry to say but I find that most of the print media just says the same thing, but Kottu is a place where I can depend on reading diverse and opposing opinions, which I think is the main attraction. I know it’s work, but if you can again approach this by finding a sponsor, I think that there would be a decent readership who would buy a monthly/weekly Kottu magazine. I’d love my (non-IT-savvy) family to be able to read the stuff on Kottu – it’s a broader view of what people are saying about what’s in the news.

Best of luck with the great plans, if I can help I will.

That’s a good idea. Could code it such that it sends an automated email and automatically clears inactive blogs. Right now I just get frustrated one day and manually go through every single blog on there, checking dates. A lot of stuff could be automated.

I just hope it won’t mean you have to surrender the ownership of kottu.org to committee or something. You’ve sort of had a Linus Torvalds like role in kottu so far which I think has been a strength in keeping it going for so long.

An idea for Kottu 2.0:
Set a time frame for dropping inactive nodes. Say 3 weeks of no posts and they get a “drop notice”. 1 month without a posting they get dropped from kottu and have to manually reapply.

That’s an event, stresses me out.

This money is there, just applying for it. Don’t think Kottu will get it, but worth a shot

Re the cost of running the site, why not run adverts on kottu itself to generate revenue on a per click basis? Surely it has enough traffic to make up the amount needed?