Regular readers of this site know we opened the Truth Farm late last year to great fanfare. There’s a lot of things to love about the Truth Farm. Some things are frustrating. All of them were pointed out to me at The Tea Makers party.
One truth about the Truth Farm is that it’s built on a separate system than the rest of the Tea Makers site. It looked like it was integrated, but in fact it lived in its own silo. It was always second tier. This distinction was artificial, technical, unnecessary, cumbersome, and was a drain on resources.
If the CBC has taught me anything, it’s that user-generated content is king, and silos must be destroyed.
So now this site works differently. Anyone can post to The Tea Makers. There is no Truth Farm. Simply go to http://www.theteamakers.com/write/ and type. If you want your own byline, you must log in, but you don’t have to.
UGC is lovely, but we can’t forget CBCGC. CBC employees know that a prime source of intel is the CBC job postings, so I’m syndicating these jobs in a new section, which makes them easier to find and allows us to discuss them openly.
It may surprise you to know that The Tea Makers gets more traffic now than it has in any time in its history since the 2005 CBC Lockout. It’s more popular today than it’s ever been.
This, at a time when the blog as a format is supposed to be waning. This, at a time when no website save Small Dead Animals will dare to link to us. This, at a time when hardly anyone with a job wants to publicly acknowledge we exist. This, at a time when CBC management dares not call us by name, not even when they chastise us.
You can make of this what you want. I have a few ideas of my own. But there’s no denying that people are reading The Tea Makers because people are writing The Tea Makers. As time goes on, this is rarely me. So I want to thank our writers and commenters, sources and supporters for all their work, encouragement, and enthusiasm.
In a very real way, this site would not exist without you, I tried to kill it a few times over. You convinced me to do otherwise.
This site has always been about discussion, and now, after all these years, I’m inviting you to come in from the cold, into this house, and sit down and talk like an equal. Part of me is nervous and hopes you motherfuckers behave and wipe your shoes.
And part of me hopes you don’t.
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Excerpt from “Taking Crazy Back” by Tod Maffin
Chapter 3: ’œThe End Came in the Frozen Goods Aisle’
“I was juggling a lot of balls just doing that, but I had other things going on too. Besides running a busy publicly traded company, the public broadcaster in Canada, CBC, had tapped me to produce and host a national live radio show about technology. At the same time I was volunteering with two charities, and had just started dating the woman who would later become my wife.
Something had to give.
There comes a point where the human body finally succumbs to stress. You are not the Energizer Bunny. You can’™t keep going and going and expect your body to cooperate. Eventually, you will crash.
When crash came, I was in aisle 3B of the Safeway on Davie Street. The frozen goods aisle’¦”
I think I know the girl that wrote that tweet about Tod’s small wee wee !
eyes in the back of his head?
Insert “lovingly maintained” penis here
Insert “lovingly maintained” joke here
Tod claims that his penis was downsized by the CBC after the 2005 labour dispute.
I protected this girl’s identity as best I could…..
And we did it all without Tod’s help!
I’m liking this design better.
It’s good work, ahead of any blog or “forum” platform.
bravo
again
Coincidence.
The timing of the deletion of the Truth Farm is interesting, especially as it comes immediately after all of the attention re:”1000 comments on Jian’s Tweets”. Coincidence? Or fear of reprisal?
You should’ve at least imported a few of the epic threads from TF. It was one of the main reasons to visit here…as a portal to some of those threads. Judging by the 1000 post mark hit on one, I can’t be alone.