Well... I guess this as a good a place as any to have a hoplessly meta discussion : )
I like your idea. I tried it though, and it still doesn't seem to fix the aesthetic issues... adding "discussion" has made the logo awkwardly wide, and on top of that even the drop shadow can't fix the readability issues, since the thing now extends well into the brighter and grayer areas of the background.
Like I said though, something needs doing. Here is my own humble attempt (cannot figure out how to embed it in the page):
It is ! [ alt text ] (url)
So
I wasn't sure how the drop shadow would interact with the low contrast sections. I can easily imagine it is not ideal.
You've removed the tag-line. I'm not sure if that is acceptable to the powers that control lesswrong. But apart from that it seems like a good logo. Actually from a user experience point of view it might be worth redoing the map background (using different map sections) as well so it is easier to tell at a glance which section we are on. Perhaps even changing the colour scheme?
I can give that a go, if it will...
After contributions from a number of us (by random example here, here) over a number of months, particularly User:wmoore and User:tommccabe (and all happening before User:Yvain's work here, so we missed those ideas) we have a discussion area.
Discussion, including discussion of the discussion area, is welcome.