When I created Crasstalk.com on a whim one night late in 2010, I had no idea what it would become. All I knew was that we had an extended network of interesting people who all had a lot to say and wanted a new place to say it.
Ever since then, I’ve been continually amazed at just how important our authors, commenters and readers are to the growth of Crasstalk — and how important Crasstalk is to them.
Over the past year, The Grand Inquisitor, Dogs of War and I have spent a lot of time thinking about how we wanted to grow this amazing community. Our first goal was to put Crasstalk on a solid financial footing – those of you who donated to the site early made amazing contributions but that’s no way to run a website of this size. So we worked hard to drive enough revenue from advertising to support the site without detracting from the commenter experience. We’re certainly not getting rich anytime soon but we’re now earning enough revenue to keep the lights on and even have a little left over for development of new site features and new projects.
So we’ve decided to branch out. Today we gave birth to launched Crassparenting.com. We’re going to have that same snarky and irreverent voice as Crasstalk, but focused on the world of parenting. The site will be driven by the contributions of our authors (12 so far, and growing) and spearheaded by the one and only Christa Palmer (also known as BBQCornnuts on Crasstalk).
But why parenting, Bots? You’re obviously not fit to raise an actual human child, what with your love of 4LOKO and strippers! Well that’s very true, but we’ve spent a lot of time studying the conversations on Crasstalk and noticed that Christa’s posts about parenting trends seemed to strike a chord every single time. Every time she wrote a new post, she seemed to have a knack for broaching subjects that interested a wide cross-section of our readership. We wanted to tap into that — and Crassparenting will be the place to talk about all of the creative, thought-provoking and, yes, weird parenting trends that the internet has spawned.
Here are the three things you can do to get involved:
- Start commenting. We’re using the same commenting system (IntenseDebate) on both sites, so there’s no need to create a new commenter account.
- Tell your friends about Crassparenting. Go over to the site and share posts on Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon. We’re not some deep-pocketed corporation like the HuffPo or Gawker Media. We depend on your support and sharing us on social media is one of the best ways to do that.
- Write a post on Crassparenting. If you want to write, or know someone who does, email me at joel -at- openthreadmedia.com.
