
Help Save American Antigravity
Date: Monday, September 11, 2006 @ 22:24:46 UTC Topic: General
Become a Member Today
We
need your help to stay alive! For $10 a month, become a member and keep
the dream alive! American Antigravity is supported by non-profit
donations, and without your help we'll have to close up shop. If you
use the site and like what we publish, then help keep us in business
for less than price of your morning cup of coffee. Tell a friend, tell
your colleagues and help us with a fund drive to afford the cost of
cutting-edge breakthrough information.
... Why We Need Funding:
First and foremost, we
need funding to stay in business. That means stabilizing my own
situation to be able to keep adding new stories, interviews, and video
to the website without having my home forclosed-on, or having my wife
leave me because my job doesn't generate any income. I made a
commitment to American Antigravity, but part of that commitment is to
survive long enough to make it work, and without donations by our
visitors, it's just not going to happen.
Secondly, over the last
couple of years, a lot of the really great alternative-science venues
out there have been closing their doors, including even the venerable
NASA BPP Project. When I incorporated in 2005, Richard C. Hoagland and
I began talking about reversing this trend through a process of
consolidation - in essence, by onboarding smaller venues to help them
stay alive as well.
For instance, a good case-example is Dr.
David Livingston, who runs "The Space Show". He's done over 300
excellent interviews across the space industry, but since he's so
focused on the space business, he doesn't have the resources to
effectively promote or manage his website. Our thought was to
consolidate his website into American Antigravity, giving him access to
both a larger audience as well as letting us manage his online presence. Additionally,
we talked about archiving conference papers on BPP, which I've already
started doing for the STAIF and HFGW conferences. Again, this helps the
community by increasing ease of access & raising the online
visibility of this material, and it helps AAG by raising our search
engine relevance, which means more traffic. Our final goal was
to begin building a solid media operation to support the space
industry. My thought had been to capitalize on the "proof of concept"
TV-webcast that I'd done with Matthew Carson in January to create a
"morning show webcast" that aerospace industry employees could watch in
the office. A great idea, but like the consolidation concept, it
requires funding. Associated with all of this is
infrastructure: simply put, it's expensive. For instance, migrating
from the remote host that I use now to a dedicated hosting solution
might cost several thousand dollars, but to effectively host all of
this new web-content, the direction to go in is a real "Content
Management System", which can cost upwards of a million dollars (when
you factor in servers, backups, load-sharing, bandwidth, etc). Matthew
Carson was able to do a professional job putting his site together for
only about $600,000, so while we are able to find a workable model,
it's still expensive. Also, based on the OSEN model,
consolidation has some real advantages. For one thing, most people
stink at web-design, and even if they don't, it's easier for them to
get the message out by publishing it on a site like AAG. There's an
existing audience, and that makes it easier for people to get the
message out. Also, publishing on AAG means that you reach an audience
that cares, unlike publishing on Slashdot, which ends up getting you a
few million flame-emails from self-righteous computer-geeks surfing the
site for stuff to trash-talk. Finally, this model builds
credibility for new ideas in general by putting them on a dedicated
forum alongside other comparable ideas. We have a non-political,
non-religious format, which keeps authors from becoming their own worst
enemy by trash-talking the president or the war in Iraq when they
really should be focusing on talking about their ideas for propulsion.
Also, by using a polished online format for presentation, it helps to
present the material in a more professional manner than a lot of the
other sites out there - and of course, with the funding to refine the
website over time, there's no limit to where it can go.
Source: http://www.americanantigravity.com/articles/585/1/Help-Save-American-Antigravity
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