Once Upon a Time, the story of the origin of Helium...
Gentle Reader,
It gives me great pleasure to be able to pass along to you, for the purpose of your interest and amusement, the story of Helium, as I understand it. Given the extraordinary number of articles that have mushroomed here since Helium's fledgling stage, this scribbler has deduced that Helium must have been founded many ages ago, possibly as far back as 2002. The early days of Helium are cloaked in a great deal of mystery, and some of the heroes of the early days, like Farmer Bob, are so advanced in years now (the better part of their sense having been poured into articles) that their memory of what Helium must have been like in its early days can be nothing less than suspect.
Nevertheless, after exhaustive research of grammatically decomposing articles here in the Helium Channel and after having panned a good long while for useful information in the community boards, I am prepared to offer you the following story, which has been rated 'G' so that you may share it with your family and children:
ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a business-savvy MBA type named Mark Ranalli who managed to convince a number of venture capitalists that he had a very sound idea for creating a database that could not only offer the venture capitalists a handsome return on their investment, but also pay its contributors too.
"How will you do this," they asked?
"Well, we'll put most of the capital into hardware and infrastructure," Mr. Ranalli replied, "surely you can see the benefits of keeping the payroll quite low..."
"But where will we get the information for the database?" the confused venture capitalists questioned.
"The members will give us information in a series of articles..."
"But why would they do this and how will we get more money?"
"They will write articles for us because we will pay them in a currency called 'fractional pennies' and be so sincere and earnest in our communications on the community boards that everyone will want to keep coming back to share more and more of their articles with us. We will get more money by sticking Google Adsense ads on these bargain articles," said Mr. Ranalli.
"How will we know if the articles are any good?" they asked.
"We will get the writers to rate each other's work. Professional editors are costly and overrated," finished Mr. Ranalli.
"You are brilliant! Where do we sign?" exclaimed the venture capitalists. And to this day, everyone (except a transient few) live happily ever after in the Kingdom of Helium.