There’s a funny little piece in Guardian Unlimited about a list of new entrants into the Collins dictionary:

Of course, they’re not new words exactly; rather, they’re words that have been flung at the proverbial brick wall so often over the last 10 years or so that they’ve stuck …

Because the vlog (an internet video journal), the blook (a blog that becomes a book, or vice versa) and the mobcast (an unholy aliance of podcast and mobile phone) are mounting such a determined challenge on the lamestream (traditional media), advances in IT provide a good chunk of the list.

Oh, and while you’re there check out whataboutery, camel toe, and waterboarding! One of which, by the way, is a form of torture.

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Alright, and it’s finally out.

Overall Winner (and Non-Fiction winner) - My War: Killing Time In Iraq by Colby Buzzell
Fiction Winner - The Doorbells of Florence by Andrew Losowsky
Comics Winner - Mom’s Cancer by Brian Fies

I can see why My War won, judging from the way the Iraq war is presented in the mainstream media these days - the whole idea of a US soldier running away to cyber cafes between shifts and blogging about such an experience is highly magnetic … indeed, almost guaranteed bestselling material.

Colby walks away with $10,000 in cash, and while he may be smiling away Paul Jones is quick to point out that his may be the last ‘open and frank military blog blook.’

I’ve talked about how Blooker prize winners are, in the end, amateurs, but while this year’s selection may not have improved from a literary point of view (don’t expect The God Of Small Things anytime soon) it has certainly presented an … alternative to what we usually get from the mainstream. The Doorbells of Florence are random pictures of doorbells accompanied by fictional stories of the people living behind them, and came about from a Flickr photo set, of all things.

Mom’s Cancer is not unique, certainly (there are loads of worthy web comics out there), but it is the backstory that counts: the author’s mother contracts cancer … and he draws the comic throughout the period. I liked it, and it was a pity it was taken down from the web, due to copyright issues.

But in the end it’ll be Colby’s book that generates the most buzz.

“Buzzell never takes the easy route of painting Iraq in black and white tones. His account gives flesh-and-blood — and anger, scorn, bile, and unexpected humor — to the Iraq debacle. His delightfully profane account loses nothing in the transformation from blog to blook.’ - Arianna Huffington

Oh, and Nick Cohen’s remarks:

“Of all the books in the competition, ‘My War’ is the one most likely to last. If, in 20 years time, people want to know what it was like to fight in Iraq, they can pick up ‘My War’ and find out. It tells what it’s like to be a grunt fighting in the Sunni Triangle – with more power and authority than the best ‘embedded reporter’ could manage. It is something of a triumph for blogs over traditional media.”

Funny, he’s just talked about Colby Buzzell a few days ago.

Last, but not least, Colby’s words on getting published:

“After I tell them, “I don’t know”, I usually tell them to go start a blog. It’s what I did, and if you think about it a blog is the best and most affordable way for an absolute nobody with no formal journalism or writing education to be a published.”

How … simple. I can’t help but smile.

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Nick Cohen recently wrote about Colby Buzzell and blooking in general, and the article’s lit off a firestorm about - strangely enough - Lulu.

The NHS blog doctor asks: ‘Why is the main-stream media so sniffy about Lulu?’, and then gives an answer:

Because they are frightened. They are in the same position as the typewriter industry a generation ago, or as the Roman Catholic Church was when, for a few moments, it took its mind off protecting paedophiles to resist the move to the vernacular. Heaven forbid that the general public should be allowed to make up their own mind about novels and the Bible.

How long will it be before a successful established author decides to cut out the middlemen and takes the next manuscript directly to Lulu? Watch the agents and publishers sweat when that happens.

But really now, Nick Cohen wasn’t all out against Lulu! He merely admits that blooking is, at this moment, a strictly amateur medium. I’ve written about this before, and talked about how we have yet to see any work of significant literary merit make it to the web. Yes, there is hope yet for the medium, but by saying we are teeming with quality right now is a tad ridiculous.

One comment did strike me while I was reading the Guardian Unlimted article:

MichaelBulley writes: Google works, after a fashion, for info: if I want to find info about sackbuts I type “sackbut” and sift through the results to get what I want and it usually works OK, but how am I going to use Google to find a good novel or a good poem that I’m as yet unaware of? The current conventions of established publishing houses may have faults that prevent some good works from seeing the light, but if I type “a good poem” in Google and hit the Enter key, is that going to do me much good?

It hits the nail right on the head: how are new readers going to find new blooks? It is a phenomenon in the publishing industry, yet nobody knows where to find one. I may be highlighting blooks in my Bookmarked! posts, and the Lulu Blooker Prize may be generating buzz, but think about it: none of these blooks are likely to be seen or bought in a bricks and mortar bookstore.

Hush about online shopping and The Long Tail: the majority of books are bought in real world bookstores (and usually on a whim, I must add), not online.

Well, if ‘a successful established author decides to cut out the middlemen and takes the next manuscript directly to Lulu’, we’d see a lot of revolution indeed.

Let’s hope that happens.

Update: I can’t not link to this article. It is brilliant!

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Amazing what writing a series can do to you. The last few days I’ve been completely out of tune with the world at large, and I even lost track of most of the blooks I read.

But on to the issue on hand: I’ve just come across Betsy Friedrich’s thesis on blog fiction … and I’m very impressed with it. So maybe as a reader I could’ve done without the first chapter (Definition of Terms), but it was a thesis, so it had to explain blogs to internet virgins academicians.

Highlights from each chapter:

Chapter 1 - Definition of Terms

Here Friedrich introduces blogs and the various forms of fictional blogging - according to her there is a distinct difference between serialized fiction and ‘blog fiction’. The first may use blogs as a medium through which fiction is written, the second utilizes all aspects of blogging - ‘feeds, comment forms and hyperlinks’.

Chapter 2 - Blog Fiction as Digital Media

Much of this chapter is used to point out how comments from readers and the interactivity of the blogging medium has helped shape blog fiction. An example of this:

At its peak Simon of Space received upwards of 75 comments on each post. Some were from new readers, but there was also a group of regular readers and posters … Their comments were often in response to one another, and many readers linked one another as a result of their meeting on the fictional blog comments section … readers were able to form a real community around a fictional text without ever interacting with one another in person.

(page 17, paragraph 2)

Another interesting point she brings up is the strange isolation of fictional blogs - almost all authors of blog fiction she interviewed did not read other fictional blogs, and in many cases were not aware of others. In an interview she conducted:

I’ve been writing a fictional blog since May ’06 and I’ve been struggling to find out if there’s a community or some sort of ‘hub’ for fiction bloggers out there. Unlike other areas (e.g. technology or politics), the whole fiction blogging world seems very small and very fractured. Sure, I’ve seen quite a few other fiction blogs in my travels but there’s no real conversation’ between them. In this respect they’re quite unlike the other blogs I’ve read. Unlike, say, a political blog where you’ll get a lot of instant feed back and links to and from your blog, fiction blogging seems to be quite an isolated and, at times, disheartening experience.

(page 19, blockquote 2)

In this view the Simon in Space’s community was a rarity.

Chapter 3 - Novels and Blogs: A Historical and Structural Analysis

Then Friedrich takes us on a trek down history - comparing blog fiction to the 18th century novel. She shows us that the 19th century novel was epistolary - or delivered in the form of letter/diary entries, a echo of blog fiction today. The rest of the chapter is spent exploring the social impact blogging has on society, interspersed with social developments and changes in the 18th century.

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Remember Sophie? That project under the Institute for the Future of the Book that was designed to replace PDFs once and for all? I wrote about it in February, and at long last there’s some news about the software.

The Institute’s blog states that an alpha version of Sophie will be released this week, which I can’t wait to get my grubby paws on. It should be very interesting to see how they’ve implemented the features they mentioned in their last press release.

A very rough roadmap for Sophie:

June — a more robust version of the current feature set

August — a special version of Sophie optimized for the OLPC (aka $100 laptop or XO) in time for the launch of the first six million machines

September — a beta version of Sophie 1.0 which will include the first pass at a Sophie (sic) reader

December — release of Sophie 1.0

I can’t wait for December. Find out more about Sophie here and here.

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