Singularist Launches

Saturday, July 30, 2005, at 11:05AM

By Eric Richardson

So yesterday I launched Singularist, a site that takes the various Gothamist sites -- Gothamist, LAist, DCist, etc -- and makes a cursory attempt to take that stupid editorial "we" voice and make it singular. In the end it's really just a regular expression that maps five or six first person plural pronouns to first-person singular, but the effect works pretty well.

After first sending me a "knock it off" type email, Gothamist head Jake Dobkins now agrees that the site is legal according to the Creative Commons license Gothamist uses. Specifically this license allows non-commercial derivative uses.

I found it funny today, though, to go over to the blogging.la post Sean made linking to Singularist and read the comments. I launched the site yesterday morning and then proceeded to go to Rancho Cucamonga for the afternoon/evening and watch minor league baseball, so I missed all the fun.

My favorite part: Jake's comment that "i would have done it as a greasemonkey plugin, rather than devoting the energy to buying the domain name and making a whole logo. to me, that suggests a guy with waaaay too much time on his hands." Hah. I wish I had too much time on my hands. I'd say the reality is quite the opposite, however.

For what it's worth, I now have a page up with the Singularist code.