This guest post from James Kakalios got me thinking — if anyone wants to take advantage of this prominent platform I’ve lucked into for the purpose of publishing their views, I’d be willing to give them an occasional opportunity. I wouldn’t want to turn the place into wall-to-wall other people (it’s mine, dangit!), but something from some other voice now and then would be OK.

I’m going to set a few rules, though.

• No commercials, and this isn’t Craigslist. Don’t send me press releases, either. Opinion pieces and entertaining summaries of your exciting research are fine.

• Don’t expect to get paid. You’ll still own your own work, but it will be posted here under the same terms with Seed that my articles are — they can also freely use them, if Seed chooses. You’re doing it for the few hundred thousand page views you’ll get.

• Links are OK. Maybe your plan is to write something provocative that will include a link to your blog and drive up your traffic — and that’s fine with me as long as what you send me stands on its own and isn’t too blatantly spammy.

• I’m the editor, and I have complete and arbitrary dictatorial power in what I’ll post. You should be familiar enough with the site that you know what kinds of things fit in. If you want to write something that disagrees with me, that’s fine, as long as it’s interesting — but no, your screed in defense of creationism or why Jesus is your Lord won’t get posted, except maybe under “I get email”.

• I am also a lazy editor. I won’t fix your typos (sending me something loaded with typos means I simply won’t use it), but on the good side, that also means I won’t change anything you write. It goes up as you send it, with only minimal changes to put it in html format.

• Details: Email your article to me, with a request to consider it as a guest post. If it’s already formatted for html, I’ll blow you a kiss, if not, just make sure it’s easily read and not reliant on intricate formatting. Don’t send a book, a few thousand words is the upper limit for a blog article. Tell me exactly how you want it attributed; anonymity is fine, it’s also fine to ask me to include a brief biography with links to your CV or whatever, as long as you write it.

• It’ll either appear or it won’t. You’re just taking a chance that it will appeal to me and that I feel like posting it. Don’t pester me with questions about when it’s coming out.

For everyone else: if I do regular guest posts, don’t worry, they won’t be frequent enough to dominate the site; I’m not aiming to change the character of Pharyngula. I’ll probably also take a moment to get into the css file and create a custom format for guest posts so that you’ll be able to easily spot them by their hot pink background and purple text, or something (all right, I’ll try to be tasteful).

And of course, maybe no one at all will be interested. No worries either way.