So what's all this, then?
(If you want to know who's behind it all, here's the scoop on that.)

Mars is a place where future-thinkers get heard. On Mars, everyone anticipates new ideas like some humans anticipate an exciting football game. Some new ideas get people all excited, and they go off and make more new ideas using the older one. Other new ideas don't survive critical analysis, but nobody's feelings get hurt. The only people who aren't admired here are the ones who can't think of any ideas on their own.

Stealing someone else's idea is a capital crime on Mars. It just isn't tolerated. Occasionally, disputes arise over who came up with an idea first. That's what the justice system here is for... to settle disputes over whose idea is whose, and to punish those who claim someone else's idea as their own.

Collaborative ideas are often the best, and group thinking is strongly encouraged. On Mars, we don't need "facilitators" to get a group to brainstorm. It's in the genes. When Martians have a meeting, no one is bored, and no one feels the meeting was a waste of time afterwards. It's highly motivating and energizing to experience a Martian brainstorm: Ideas literally pour around the room like thunder and lightning, one idea merging with another, and yet another exerting such a strong charge that it draws a hundred ideas into unity. Epipheny!

So don't expect Mars to stay the same. I have lots of ideas for this site and am limited only by time. At the present time, here are a few of the ideas I'm trying out:

• Converging bookmarks tags with article categories. Some time ago I started entering all my bookmarks on del.icio.us, that great idea about social bookmarking. A couple of events spurred me to try to mirror my bookmarks on Mars--(1) a series of unfortunate outages at del.icio.us made my bookmarks unavailable, which just wasn't tolerable, and (2) a subsequent trial use of mysqlicious made me realize I wanted to be able to store more information about each bookmark than del.icio.us allows. So, I set up a custom Wordpress bookmarklet that lets me post to del.icio.us and to Wordpress from the same form. On Wordpress, I'm also not limited to a set number of tags (as I am on del.icio.us), and my tags can have spaces in them (in other words, multi-word tags, which I find useful).
  
  I also saw no point in having a different set of tags for my article content than I do for my bookmarks, so I undertook a great deal of hacking of Wordpress to let me do this. Essentially, I've made use of the Wordpress post_category field (which didn't appear to be used for anything else) to establish special super-categories for my posts:
  • Articles
  • News
  • Software Evaluations
  • Software Recommendations
  • Rejected Software
  • Resources
  Articles are just that... writings that consist either of the three R's: Research, Reviews, or Rants on topics of interest to me. Since these typically represent a significant investment of time and are actually my own ideas, they appear in the prominent central position in the site's layout. News items are del.icio.us bookmarks of stories from my RSS news feeds that would make useful fodder for future articles. Software entries describe Mac OS X software that strike me as really interesting ideas, which I want to try out on my Mac. Those that I end up adding to my personal inventory become Recommendations. Those that don't are Rejected. Resources are del.icio.us bookmarks that I keep for future reference in researching various topics--typically, programming, web application development, web design, or Mac OS X.

To be continued...