I admit some of the articles here are old, but I’ve been hoarding links for awhile now with never enough time to post them up. The picture above, for instance, is a graphical representation of all the cross references in the Bible. Click the picture for the source, or read on:

• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, by Chris Anderson (the same guy who came up with the Long Tail concept), looks at how and why anything to do with the web eventually becomes free.
• Copyrighting Creativity is J.K.Rowling vs the blogosphere.
• The Greatest Punctuation Mark You Never Use: Interrobang
• Web Offers A Market For Budding Hemingways is a cynical look at blooking. From Reuters.
• [Blook]: Sonja Nitshke. Brilliantly written, structured and presented.
• [Blook]: No Man Is An Island, by Gavin Williams. I’ve snatched sections during my sparse online time, but I’ve to admit I’m frightfully behind on it. I like what I’ve read so far. Bookmarked.

Three online storytelling efforts (read: webcomics) that deserve mention:

• Garfield Minus Garfield is a good look at the Garfield comic strips without the orange cat. It turns the strip into an ‘even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life’.
• Adam’s Apple. Requires an understanding of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the Macbook Air … and God.
• The Life Of Mann is an online graphic novel that features a different artist every chapter. Both The Museum Of Modern Fiction and The Life Of Mann are the projects of Josef Lee, a Singaporean artist and graphic designer.

PS: I’ve got a break coming up, so I will have enough time to post up some articles I’ve been working on. I apologize for my inactivity: exams really are not letting up.

PPS: Novelr has gone through a server change and a minor redesign, and I hope it’s better, faster, and easier to read. Enjoy.

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I love Sharon Bakar. Just the other day I found two articles via her blog (Bibliobibuli) entitled ‘The Sharp Rise (And Quick Fall) Of The Blogger’s Books.’ It is the ugly sound of publishers waking up to reality: blogger popularity will not translate to book sales. A particularly telling sentence:

… “built-in” audience or not, it all comes down to content. “A good writer is a good writer,” says Leitch. “Dana Vachon’s book (Mergers & Acquisitions), which was based on his blog - the key to that, it wasn’t about a guy that blogged. He’s a real writer. I don’t think anyone picks up the book and is like, ‘Hey, where are the links?’”

Wonderful stuff.

On a partially related front: does writing really matter? Caleb Crain writes in the New Yorker that reading may very well die out: instead, people will communicate through more visual mediums. The image that hit me was Socrates laughing away in his grave - he believed writing to be inferior to conversation.

A paragraph that made me cringe:

… but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.”

In which case you and I will be very rare people indeed.

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• James from JPS/fact (formerly Progression, which I quoted from in my post about lousy blook quality) is asking a favour from all of us. He’s currently doing a PhD on the influence of the internet on traditional print fiction, and he wants to compile a list of novels (printed & published) that have been influenced by the internets, either being published as fake blogs, emails, web pages and such. Go, on, give him a hand - his blog has amazing insights into the world of online (and blog) fiction.
• While you’re there read his post on online fiction and popularity - there’ll a few points to think about, though it’s written as a rant.
• Duane Poncy from Elohi Gadugi (and The Germaine Truth) has done something truly laudable: setting up a forum, Creative Blogs, for blook writing and online reading. Go join up, and quickly!
• Business Standard - Read a good blook lately?
• After releasing Sophie (which I covered here), The Institute For The Future Of The Book is hard at work again. They’ve outdone themselves with CommentPress, a plugin that helps give context to blog comments in a post. I can already see fascinating applications for it - non-fiction blooks in particular have great use for context sensitive reader and author interaction. TIFTFOTB projects are usually academic in nature - so I’ll not be surprised if the world of academia (and academic blogs in particular) employ this plugin to dissect articles and posts. Peer review, anyone?

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• Just discovered Xlibris: a ’strategic partner of Random House Ventures’. Much like Lulu, only … smaller, and connected to a traditional publishing house at that.
• Anne Wayman tells us how Writers can stop Global Warming.
• [Blook]: Death On The Beach. Blooked on a ‘displaced Blackberry’, and currently on Chapter 4.
• [Blook]: I have read half of the first arc of Omen of Chaos, and … well. Carlos is prolific and enthusiastic, and really dedicated to the story, but OoC is not something you’ll find in a bookstore anytime soon. I’m keen to see what he writes next, though: someone who writes so much can only get better and better at it.

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Article 1. Movable Type 4 is now open sourced! It’s the one blogging software I’ve been yearning to try out - and I daresay that it just might beat Wordpress as the ideal platform to blook on (marginally easier to code for, but I don’t know yet). I’ll be installing it as soon as I can find the time, and I’ll do a writeup on it, to complete that series on blogging platforms I did awhile back.

Article 2. ‘I Was Just So Relieved the Zombie Didn’t Keep a Blog‘

Blooks

1. Charlie Baker sent me a contact message just the other day, alerting me to The Fantasy Years. I’ve tried coming up with a description for it, but I think his words are the best:

It’s satire about America inthe 1990s. It’s unabashedly political. I’m a journalist- Charlie Baker is just a pen name - and my writing is very newsy and based in the real world. It’s pretty much completed and I’m just posting it in small pieces. I’d be curious about your comments.

I can’t at the moment, since I’ve only glanced through it - and I apologize, Charlie. But I’ll make it up to you within two weeks.

2. Lee left me a comment and a link back to his blook: Mortal Ghost. It’s YA, and the first page tells you outright where you can read, how you can read, and where to find every chapter. Again, just a quick glance through - but he’s completed it and even prepared podcasts!

Going to close this really short Bookmarked! post with a site that’s incredibly addictive: One Sentence, which works exactly like it says. Postsecret in words.

Whoah.

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