We all know that anything becomes twice as cool when you add the word distributed in front of it. For instance: proofreading sounds really boring, but when you turn it into distributed proofreading, it becomes awesome.

And we've all heard editors complain about the unfathomable horrors of going through The Slush Pile and I think most of us have wanted to take a peek at this fabled animal one time or another. So enter my brilliant idea: Distributed Slush Pile Reading.

It's very simple, really. Slush readers sign up and get presented (maybe through email) with some of the slush stories. Each story gets sent to several readers. They assign a numerical value to the stories. Then a number crunching program averages the score for each story and presents the editor(s) with a ranked list of the slush stories.

By implementing a good system of reader registration and making sure a story will never be presented to a certain person more than once, you could probably eliminate any cheating. And even if some dork manages to work the system, it still won't get his story published.

You could add some extra features like having the readers add some optional comments for the author, in case the story doesn't make it past the slush pile. From the editor's point of view, they could assign some sort of reliability value to slush readers, which would weigh their opinions when calculating the story scores.

It's important to note that I only suggest this as a slush filter, it will still be the editor or editorial team of the publication that decides which stories get published. Though it might be an interesting experiment to create a completely community edited publication this way too, combining it with something like the Guttenberg proofreading (in this case, editing) concept.