"Write now is good."

If the Internet is a copy machine, then...

Photo: "You've reached the office of Mr. Copy Machine" by Shoreline 

The opening words of "Better Than Free", a new ChangeThis manifesto by Kevin Kelly, grabbed my attention:

The Internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the Internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap—they are free...

This made me think back to my pre-Internet days. While listening to a favorite band's song on the radio was free, getting access to that band's entire album usually meant buying it at the record store. Getting access to a new book meant either borrowing it from the library (if other voracious readers hadn't gotten to it first) or purchasing it from a bookstore.

Most people bought newspapers and magazines without reservation. Home delivery subscriptions — right to the front stoop — was often the preferred method of receiving them.

Before we knew what the World Wide Web was, we had free access to creative works, but that free access seemed a lesser alternative to owning an actual copy of that work. If we could afford a record, CD or book, we would buy it, and that money went to the creators — after a long line of creativity-related (sometimes) middling "middlemen" first took their cuts. We fans then had full access to our beloved works; we could listen to or read them at a whim and could share them as we wanted, within strictly defined technology boundaries (e.g., having access to a dual-cassette recorder or a wondrous Xerox machine).

While libraries had copies of periodicals and publications in "reading rooms", they would not let them to be checked out to take home. The only viable way to enjoy a magazine or paper was to buy a copy, and it was affordable.

Seeing how many media outlets now struggle daily to survive, as their collectives staffs work to produce content that Web users now expect to be free — yet costs real money to produce — I read Kelly's treatise very closely. In proposing what is "better than free", he describes "eight uncopyable values".

What are they? You'll have to read his manifesto to find out.

It is a concise, focused read. Solutions for this painful period of media transition are out there, and Kelly's eight "generatives" could be a basis for many of them.

If you create online content, are involved in social media, or just want to catch a glimpse of what the future may hold for media, reading it will be worth your while.

And, if you want to discuss "Better Than Free" after you read it, head back to this post and comment.

Which writers have inspired you? And who has inspired them?

Photo: "rough first draft" by nuanc

Early spring this year, I posted about Opium Magazine's Network of Writers Experiment. If you have not sent them a quotation from a writer who has taught you something valuable about writing, you can still do so ... now, with a twist.

Opium (creator of the East Coast/West Coast Literary Death Match) would like you to send that writer's quotation ... and also requests that you to contact the same writer to ask them for a quote from a writer who taught them something. It works like this:

...if I quote Tobias Wolff, now I will go and ask Tobias Wolff for a quote, something he's learned from a writer. In this way, the network concept will be a) more amazing, if possible, and b) nearly impossible to design in print, but Opium design mastermind David Barringer will take care of that.

Send any quotes here: [email protected]. Also, if you don't know how to contact a writer, or would rather not contact them yourself, we can likely help, so don't hesitate to ask.

Deadline is quick: August 4th (this Monday!).

These submissions will go into Opium's next print edition. And, as offered, they'll be happy to help you contact your writer if you'd like.

If you send in a quotation, drop a comment and let us know!

NOTE: I sent them a quotation from a very popular writer, and I'm crafting my email to him now. We'll see if said-famous-inspiring writer sends me a quotation, too. One of life's little adventures, and I'll post an update when I get a response.

Book masterpieces, summarized in six words

Photo: "teeny tiny book i bound" by robayre

Quick link: "Six Word Cliffs Notes" from SMITH Magazine (via Salon's "Table Talk"). One example:

The times were good. Also bad.
A Tale of Two Cities

Anyone feeling brief today? Leave a comment with your tiny summations.

Print your own magazine with MagCloud

Derek Powazek describes a new beta site with great potential for magazine self-publishers — MagCloud:

Short attention span version: For the last year, I’ve been working with HP Labs on a very cool new project. It’s called MagCloud, and it’s the future of magazine publishing. Go see.

Longer attention span version: If you know me at all, you know I’m obsessed with publishing. My mom tells a story about me, in elementary school, having to write a paper about confederate times. Instead, I wrote and designed an entire newspaper, right down to the editorial comics, that took place during the era. This was before I’d even learned the word “procrastination...” (Read his entire post here.)

When I first saw this, I thought, "ZINE!" with great excitement. I've been making zines with friends and family for ages. While using MagCloud would definitely eliminate the stay-up-all-night-at-the-copy-center-and-hope-you're-double-siding-it-correctly part of the process, I know I will adapt.

Now, off to my zine dream journal to start brainstorming and sketching. If you're interested in using MagCloud, sign up here to start.

If you could make a magazine, what would it be? Leave a comment, and I'll feature your magazine ideas in a future post.

Found at xBlog via SwissMiss.

Network of writers experiment

Writers, this one's for you: Opium Magazine has announced an experiment they'd like you to be part of:

We're putting together a series of quotes about what authors have learned from other authors (or other sources)—something another writer once said to you that's really stuck in your head and encouraged or influenced your work. Mine [meaning Todd Zuniga, Opium's founding editor], for instance, is: "I write one story at a time. It's my way, it's not the only way." —Tobias Wolff. While my quote came from an e-mail exchange nine years ago, yours could be something that occurred while reading an author's work, from having a verbal exchange, or from something they said while teaching at an MFA program. Anything really.
 
So give it a shot! Write a sentence or two on what you learned from another writer and send it to us here.

To read the complete details, click away.

I encourage all interested writers to consider a submission. The more different voices and perspectives featured, the better. There's a vast community of writers online (and off-line, of course) with a ton of collective wisdom. Imagine the possibilities if we all share with and learn from each other.

Found objects, sky adoption, and online writers groups

Work projects have me surfing the Interweb. Some fabulous finds I want to share with you are:

1. FOUND magazine
It's easy to spend a lot of time on this site, looking at the random finds. Its mysterious photos and cryptic notes have really sparked my imagination. I laughed hysterically at some; with others, I became pensive. The site entertained me for quite a while.

The above image is the "Find of the Day" for today. Arianna Meyer in Kansas sent in this "Shopping + Guys" note, and explains:

I found this when I was moving into my new house. Someone who lived there before probably had kids who played school. Obviously this essay received an A+.

Reader submissions are the lifeblood of FOUND magazine, so submit, already.

2. Urbis
Urbis is an online community dedicated to providing feedback on written work. Users submit their work and their "goals" for the work; other users (either "friends" or "strangers") then review the work. The site tracks the ratings and provides an analysis of what the community thinks about any given work.

According to their site:

Urbis is a community of creative people that offers sophisticated tools to help advance creativity and expose it to an audience.

If you're looking for an online writers group, Urbis could be the place.

3. Adopt the Sky
As a card-carrying member of the Cloud Appreciation Society, this site caught my eye. Readers in the U.S. now have a chance to "adopt" one square mile of sky in a symbolic effort to clean it up and help lower asthma rates. It's like the "adopt-a-highway" program, only way above our heads. The group Earthjustice, which started this project, describes what they do:

Earthjustice evens the odds in court against law-breaking industries and government agencies, protecting the environment and human health.

We do it for free. And we win...

Adopt the sky and sign the petition to tell the EPA we need better air standards now.

Cleaner air = more oxygen to the brain = more brain cells to use for writing and creative endeavors. Consider signing the petition.

Crowdwriting will continue

Photo: "Crowd heads home" by logicalrealist

After my stint with Assignment Zero, I'm convinced that crowdsourced book writing will continue. It seems that others think so, too. Here's an interesting perspective from SMITH Magazine's "The Wisdom of Crowds and T-Shirt Slogans":

As resident book nerd, I’d especially like to direct you to this piece on crowdsourced creative writing. Novelist is one of the most solitary professions I can think of (exceptions notwithstanding) so it’s interesting to see what large groups of strangers come up with. From fantasy (I think?) to romance, it seems like results have been mixed but encouraging. I’m definitely going to keep my eyes open for books with hundreds of contributors.

I'd especially love to see crowdsourced humor novels. After reading many sections of the random tome that is "A Million Penguins," I have to say that it is some of the funniest writing I've read in a long time. If you're up for a good laugh, click here.

A few months ago, I had no idea that The Institute for the Future of the Book even existed. The organization describes itself as "a New York-based think tank dedicated to inventing new forms of discourse for the network age." Here's their response to AZ's crowdsourcing coverage — "Perspectives on Distributed Creativity":

There are many of the usual suspects like Benkler, Lessig, Jarvis, Shirky, Surowiecki, Wales etc., but as many or more of the pieces venture off the beaten track. There's a thought-provoking interview with Douglas Rushkoff on open source as a cultural paradigm, some stuff on the Wu Ming fiction collective (which is fascinating), a piece about Sydney Poore, a Wikipedia "super-contributor," and some coverage of our work, an interview with McKenzie Wark about Gamer Theory and collaborative writing. There's also an essay by one of the Assignment Zero contributors, Kristin Gorski, synthesizing some of the material gathered on the latter subject: "Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book."

The Institute will again be involved in supporting a collaborative book, as McKenzie Wark will launch a new project later this fall. I'll post here when I find out more about it. If you're interested in contributing to it, you'll have a chance to.

Have you ever participated in a crowd-written book? Have you worked on an online collaborative project? Would you like to?

Assignment Zero: 80 interviews strong

One of the most concrete and exciting results of Assignment Zero's crowdsourcing coverage is the Interview Directory. It features 80 interviews/Q&A's from the experts of crowdsourcing and Assignment Zero contributors.

Following are links to (and short excerpts from) a couple of interviews I conducted. Both provide acute insight into the social, creative and technical aspects of collaborative online book writing:

1. Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher of the U.K.'s Penguin Books:
• "A Million Little Authors: Piece by piece, a crowd writes a novel"

It ["A Million Penguins" wikinovel experiment] was anonymous, and it was a collective effort and not attributable to any particular person...The whole purpose was that it was anonymous and crowd-led, rather than ego-led.

2. McKenzie Wark, Professor at the New School for Social Research and author of “A Hacker Manifesto” and “Gamer Theory 2.0”:
• “Wisdom of the Gaming Crowd: Best Practices of a Crowdsourced Author”

In the book I use the term “gamespace” for this sense that many people have that everyday life is becoming more and more gamelike. That your job is a rat race, your pension fund is in a casino, politics is a horse race, and so on. But these games never really seem to be fair, and they don’t have very explicit rules..

There is such a wealth of information. I provide below the subdirectory links to the entire Interview Directory. If you have a little free time this weekend, surf around. You'll definitely learn something new and interesting, directly from crowdsourcing experts' own words.

• Art: Photography, Film, Visual Arts, Literature, Design
• Government, Legal Issues
• Journalism
• Business Theory and Practice
• Thinkers and Academics

Assignment Zero: Pioneer journalism in the works

On March 14th, Wired News announced an experiment in journalism in association with NewAssignment.net: an online collaborative project where professionals and amateurs worked together. It's called Assignment Zero.

I joined immediately for many reasons. On my AZ user page, I summed them up:

I believe that blogging will get stories told that media outlets cannot and/or will not pay attention to. I want to be a part of this storytelling. The more stories that are told, the more accurate a view people have about their world; they can then make better choices — be it who they vote for, where they travel, what they buy — in all aspects of their lives. This (in theory and hopefully) creates a stronger, healthier democracy because more individuals have more power in their own lives.

Today, the first results of months of work by a large pro-am crowd were published on Wired. Here are the links:

1. Assignment Zero: Can Crowds Create Fiction, Architecture and Photography?
2. Open-Source Journalism: It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think
3. Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book (I worked on this illustrious team and wrote this article. Go, Crowdsourced Books!)
4. (Q&A) Your Assignment: Art
5. Stock Waves: Citizen Photo Journalists Are Changing the Rules

The AZ crowd has a lot to be proud of. Overall, hundreds of contributors reported, researched, interviewed and wrote, thoroughly looking at the phenomenon of crowdsourcing. I'm thrilled to have been a part of this pioneer experiment; I think its successes could have a positive impact on the media.

So, what exactly is crowdsourcing? How did the experiment go? What did I get out of this? I'll answer all these questions in follow-up posts over the coming week.

This I'm sure of: online collaborative work will continue to play a growing role in our worlds of both work and fun. Technology has made the world too small, and made connection between people too easy, to think otherwise. This will spur great creativity and innovation, as long as people continue to reach out to each other and work together.

The rules of human engagement haven't changed; people still need to communicate, be nice, and work hard to make real and lasting progress on any project. How we will use technology to do so is what will be so interesting.

Published on Wired.com!

With many more details to follow, here's the link to my article on Wired.com:

"Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book"

I wrote this as part of my work on the pioneering pro-am journalism project AssignmentZero. Hundreds of people from around the globe tackled the topic of crowdsourcing, and Wired has started publishing the results today.

More soon!