ENTRIES TAGGED "writing"
The 7 key features of an online community
They all contribute to the personal experience of the shared space
Here’s something about the user experience of online communities that you’ve probably never considered: everyone in an online community is having a unique, individualized experience, even though they’re all doing it together. Think about that for a second. Your activity feed is not my activity feed, it has different places, people, and pages appearing in it. Some of the posts in your feed may also appear for me, depending on our collective preferences. But most of the time I’ll only see a small portion of the things you see, and then share those with my own subset of friends. It’s like riding the subway. It’s a personal experience in a shared space: a million small interactions that can be meaningful, or totally forgettable.
NaNoWriMo Now Underway
One of my favorite keynotes from TOC 2009 was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) founder Chris Baty. It's November, which means the annual event is now underway. Check out the website for ways to support and participate….
News Roundup: Digging Around Amazon's Topaz Format, Twitter Novels, June Ebook Sales Up 87% Over '07
Digging Around Amazon's Topaz File Format Late Night Code is popping the hood on Topaz, that mysterious "other" file format used on the Kindle: Mobipocket files purchased from Amazon have an AZW extension (which presumably stands for Amazon Whispernet – the name of the Kindle wireless download service). Mobipocket files from other sources will have a MOBI or PRC…
Writing Novels with Twitter
ReadWriteWeb has a brief survey of mini serialized novels in the U.S.: In Japan, mobile phone novels called "keitai shousetsu" have become so successful that they accounted for half of the ten best-selling novels in 2007. Here in the Western world several would-be novelists are attempting to use Twitter to create the same phenomenon. Some of the novels tweeted so…
Story Development Thrives in the Sports Department
The Associated Press recently commissioned an anthropological study into how youth obtain news information. What struck me most was this reference to something a bit orthogonal to the report — the elements of story development. From Ethan Zuckerman's My Heart's in Accra: … the biggest thing I took from report was the connection between sports coverage and other news coverage….
Web Publicity + Free = A Fighting Chance
Sci-fi author Scott Sigler uses podcasts, giveaways and grassroots Web marketing to build interest in his work. We've covered Sigler in the past, but his recent interview with The Independent illustrates the value lesser-known writers can derive from Web-based brand building and free distribution: Sigler's thinking — and this is the revolutionary bit — is that it's worth making…
What Makes a Collaborative Writing Project Successful?
Publishers have experimented with wikis and computer games to create successful collaborative projects. We explore some lessons learned from recent projects, and describe a newly-launched game from The Guardian.
News Roundup: Google's Book Scanning, Kindle's Future Path, Authorship Increases Exponentially, Amazon Takes on "Amazon Tax," 5 DRM Messes
A Glimpse into Google's Book Scanning Google doesn't divulge specifics about its proprietary book scanning set-up, but the Associated Press offers a brief look into the manual scanning process used for old/fragile titles. (Continue reading) Kindle's All-Encompassing Future Path Jeff Nolan writes about the path of the Kindle: It's clear that [Jeff] Bezos sees a day when any and all…
Book Reading Down, Book Writing Up
In a New York Times Sunday Book Review essay, Rachel Donadio notes the interesting discrepancy between book reading and book writing. Namely, people aren't reading, but they're certainly doing a lot of writing. In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which…
Q&A with WEbook President Sue Heilbronner
In this Q&A, WEbook president Sue Heilbronner discusses her company's Web-based collaborative publishing.