Gentlemen,
I happened upon this fantastic resource for men that I wanted to share with you all: www.artofmanliness.com. It's a very well put together website, and has a great mobile version for browsing on your smart phone while your on the John at work!
The website has a vast catalog of articles specifically written for men, by men. Articles include "How to Throw a Perfect Football Spiral", "How to Make the Best Beef Jerky in the World", and "How to Grow a Handlebar Moustache".
To be honest I'm a little jealous of this website! I feel like the MOP have the skills, knowledge, and breadth of experience to produce an equally (if not better) resource for men. Our group includes men who have served in our military, travelled the world, shot at (and sometimes hit) large mammals, raised small humans, fought and defeated cancer, jumped out of a plane, spied on the Chinese, drove across the U.S., seduced beautiful women and tricked them into marriage, walked on a frozen river, launched a mouse into space, helped people less fortunate, skied down mountains, climbed up mountains, drank their own urine, graduated with Bachelors, Masters and PhDs, cooked delicious meals, mixed elaborate cocktails, smoked the finest cigars, been in bar fights, shoveled out of record breaking blizzards, hit a hole in one, bowled an almost perfect game, read the greatest literacy masterpieces etc. etc.
Why can't we have a website that men flock to to gain knowledge and expand their minds. We have everything we need. Perhaps we should launch a new website/blog for writing full articles for men? Something like www.menoftheworld.com.
We could break it down between the group, so someone writes and posts an article each month to start. With 6 members that means we'd only have to each write 2 articles a year. Not too taxing I think. The articles should come from your own life experiences. For example maybe McPageTurner writes a piece about how men should travel for work e.g. 10 things to pack for business travel. Or Pompous writes a piece about how golf e.g. 5 tips to help your short game. Or Master Lieb shares advice on geocaching e.g. Geocaching for the beginner.
We have too much knowledge not to share it with other men who need our help.
Please let me know your thoughts on this idea. I see it as a way to draw attention to the MOP in the long run.
Go forth,
LLdP
2 comments:
I think this is a great idea. I know it's one we've pursued peripherally for a while. What I would add to your synopsis is that we just need an angle. That is what makes the MOP so great. It is not just that we are a group of extraordinary men; we are a group of extraordinary men reading books together.
So, I think to do something like this, it can't just be men talking about manly stuff. That is a market that--while not saturated--has a lot of players. We would need an angle...a la Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Basically, why should people listen to or read our articles over anyone else...aside from the fact that we have done all of those pretty remarkable things.
Perhaps the answer is our books, our ritualistic approach for the quest for knowledge, etc. Having an angle or theme would also help us shape the site as well as each article. This could be as simple as a website devoted to the book club and how to properly run one. In which case, we are getting back to what we have always dreamed of, trademarking and marketing MOP. I can see a website where book clubs around the world read our books with us and hold their own discussions and meetings simultaneously with ours. I can see us posting videos of the burnings and the growings, 'pick your mascot' page where they enter names and bits of info about their group and it spits out a mascot with a name, summaries of books (not in a book report sense, but sort of like 'minutes' from our meetings), how-to-guides about selecting venues/drinks/attire, selected questions to go with each book, trivia, etc. To tie in the manliness, we each have a profile page with a specialty area or two, in which we post the stories that you mention.
The obvious thing to consider is that we essentially are doing this, but keeping it private, so the jump would be to make this public, and devote more time/energy to it. Is this where we contact Hank? Can we charge money for this? Would we want to? Do we want to create the site and keep it private and then show it to Hank or someone? Do we want to trademark, copyright, etc.?
In closing, I think that it is not boasting to say that we have a really cool thing going and a really strong set of individuals to contribute to something like this. (And this is coming from the guy who hasn't been at a council in over a year). It's not just the group of men that is remarkable, it's the 'idea' that is intrinsically good.
How about I set up some sort of content managed website to use as a starting point. It might be good to have something tangible to build off of. We have talked about marketing the MOP in the past, so perhaps a separate website from the blog would make sense. Our blog is great to our group, but it may confuse/scare people about what it is we do. I'm not sure what the URL for this new site could be. I mean we could always transfer our menoftheparchment.com domain name to the new site when necessary.
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