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Readers of The New York Post are set to become little Shakespeares, with a new online service encouraging them to create new words. Whether this will be a case of a million monkeys at a million typewriters creating Hamlet is yet to be seen.

The New York Post is introducing the Addictionary service, which asks users to create words and then define them. Other users may then rate and comment on those words. More popular words could potentially end up in common usage, especially if large swathes of New York Post readers become exposed to them.

Addictionary has been used successfully on some other websites, such as the Comedy Central site and at Dictionary.com. What The New York Post and SpectrumDNA, creators of the Addictionary platform, hope the service will do is increase the word-of-mouth knowledge of the newspaper. With many newspapers struggling in the current economy, finding ways to get people talking about your newspaper has become a focus of many of the bigger newspaper companies.

The hope is that greater awareness of The New York Post and its website will lead to more traffic and thus more temptation for advertisers. Newspapers rely on advertiser revenues, which have gone down tremendously in the current economy. Finding ways to increase circulation can allow newspapers to charge more for their advertising space.

This tactic of getting users to make up new words seems a bit too gimmicky to be helpful in raising advertising revenue, but as The New York Post intends to release various merchandise based on Addictionary in the future, it may also be looking to expand into new revenue streams.