chuggnutt.com

I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I don't quite get how this is going to work: Publisher launches its first "wiki" novel. It's:

...a Web-based, collaborative novel that can be written, edited or read by anyone, anywhere thanks to "wiki" software, the technology behind Web encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

The novel, "A Million Penguins," went live on Thursday and its first lines are already being written, edited and rewritten by enthusiasts on www.amillionpenguins.com.

Penguin, which embarked on the project with a group of creative writing and new media students, says it is using the novel as a test of whether a group of disparate and diverse people can create a "believable fictional voice."

So, are they planning on "locking down" chapters as they're finished? Because there's really nothing stopping anybody from going in and changing, well, everything at any point, if it truly is open like Wikipedia. Suddenly chapter three makes no sense because chapters one and two are now telling a different story.

Cool and interesting experiment, though. I might have to play around with it.

Does this sound like a good idea?

Woe un2mnkind! The text message is trying to summarise the great poet John Milton and a respected academic thinks this may be a smart new way to teach literature.

A company offering mobile phones to students has hired Professor John Sutherland, professor emeritus of English Literature at University College London, to offer subscribers text message summaries and quotes from literary classics.

The hope is that messages in the truncated shorthand of mobile phones will help make great literature more accessible.

So butchering the classics into text-messaging shorthand that are barely understandable will make them more accessible? Oh, this is so, so wrong.

First of all, there's no "teaching" of literature going on here; you might as well be getting summaries of last night's episode of "Lost"—only reading "MadwyfSetsFyr2Haus" would not entice me to pick up Jane Eyre.

Second of all, what does a professor emeritus of English Literature even know about text-messaging shorthand? Jeez, I don't know much, but the examples they give seem contrived even to me.

Third, what self-respecting teen would subscribe to this service? Here's a hint—those of us who, as teens, were into literature and could quote from various works really, really weren't a part of that crowd. If you wanted to be part of that crowd, well, you wouldn't be getting literature on your phone, as it were.

Via Slashdot.

Update 11/17: CNN has a better article which has more on the pushback against the service.

My wife finished packing up nearly all the books today, in preparation for the move next month. I only kept a few out, on-hand; in the spirit of useless lists, here's what's left on my shelf:

• Frontier Doctor
• The Illuminatus! Trilogy
• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• Thunder Over the Ochoco: The Gathering Storm
• How the Mind Works

And a couple of books on cheese I borrowed from my mother.