Holtzbrinck Online

Obama, the Social Butterfly

To be honest, I haven't exactly been engrossed in recent political news and agenda like most Americans. There's good reason to pay extra attention to the 2008 election, we have our first female candidate - Hillary Rodham Clinton. Senator Clinton, however, will not be the focus of this post. Earlier this month, our alternate Democratic candidate Barack Obama has integrated a full-fledged social network on his website BarackObama.com. Essentially a tool for his supporters to organize their efforts in the most optimal manner, signing up with My.BarackObama.com provides every user a slew of functionalities - My Dashboard (a page showing an overview of your account's activities), My Friends, My Events, My Messages, My Groups, My Fundraising, and My Blog. Support rallies have never been so easy to organize.

In addition to this network tool on Obama's official website, he also covered other bases by creating accounts with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook (see screen shot). I'm not sure if he has my vote just yet, but he's sure caught my [web] attention.

Still Searching

The February 5 issue of The New Yorker features a decent overview of the Google Book Search program and the related legal, technical, and logistical issues. The article, called “Google’s Moon Shot,” does not offer any big, new insights, but it does have some interesting bits, such as a portion about Dan Clancy, the chief engineer of Google’s system for scanning books. All in all, the article serves as a good refresher, and should get those less familiar with the Book Search project more or less up to speed.

"Google's Moon Shot"

Choose Your Own Adventure

There was an interesting post recently on Wired about Hotel Dusk, a game for the Nintendo DS portable system that stretches the definition of "game" and "book" to meet somewhere in the middle.

A quick overview: Hotel Dusk is a game that plays like a mystery novel set in an old hotel.   The player navigates around the hotel and speaks to the various characters in an attempt to solve the mystery.    The style is reminiscent of film-noir (both graphics and dialogue) and the vast bulk of the game consists of reading what the characters are saying to you.    And you even hold the system sideways so that it opens like a small book.   

E-Books are generally assumed to be the natural incursion of books into digital media, but more success is being seen with formats like podcasts and cell phone serialization, which makes me wonder if our efforts are not better spent trying to find the best format for a given story, instead of trying to wedge readers into the formats that the publishing industry is most comfortable with.   

The Socially Impulsive

Who among us hasn't sent an impolitely-worded, sloppy email and then regretted having sent it moments later. I don't do it often, but I look over English soccer league chat sites every now and again (never at work, of course), and the banter can get heated and potentially offensive fairly quickly. Social networking and other forms of online interaction require a different set of emotional triggers than face-to-face discussion, and as evidenced by an assault last October involving two men who had been communicating in a chat room, a pickax, and a knife, not appreciating the rules of online engagement can be dangerous (read the NYT article). The absence of real-time responses such as change in tone and other social cues, makes it easier for us to fall victim to the "online disinhibition effect," or flaming. So, what does this mean for those of us who work in this largely self-policing, socially ambiguous landscape? Does this mean that we resign ourselves to being as impersonal as possible for fear of unleasing online rage? Or, maybe it simply means that we just deal with the human emotions behind the IP address, as we do in the real world, and try to be as decent as possible to each other.

A Long Way Gone

This compelling memoir by Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier in Sierra Leone, is on sale today. I’ve been keeping close tabs on this book since early January, when the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, asked us to develop the website for the book. Since then, A Long Way Gone has received a huge amount of advance praise and very strong reviews. As Belinda Luscombe of Time Magazine says, “Ishmael Beah doesn't realize it, but he's about to become a [literary-humanitarian] rock star … (I'll eat my hat if he does not meet Bono in the next 12 months.)” Beah, now 26 and living in New York City, recalls his journey in and out of the madness of the civil war in Sierra Leone. He fled attacking rebels at the age of twelve, was picked up by the government army at thirteen, and after years experiencing and committing unspeakable acts, released to a UNICEF rehabilitation center. His story is poignant: shocking, and often extremely violent, but also touching and hopeful. It’s one of those books that has stayed with me; that I think about at random moments. Importantly, as Beah continues to point out in interviews and speeches to non-profit and humanitarian organizations, his story represents the lives of hundreds of thousands of children across the world. Poised to become a huge success, the book, which is also the current Starbucks Entertainment featured book, is well worth the time.

For more, visit www.alongwaygone.com

The literary stars of tomorrow (and the closing of bookstores today)

Chris Powers writes on the Guardian book blog about the demise of the independent bookstore, and wonders about the literary scenes of tomorrow (he cites as past examples the City Lights store in Calfornia and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Paris where, in the photo, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein are amiably chatting). However, as sad as it is, a number of these venerable bookstores are going out of business, and the next wave of literary scenes will revolve not around bookstores (or even one geographical location, such as Paris in the'20s), but these scenes will instead revolve around online, virtual locations such as websites, blogs and wikis. The Internet has flattened the world to such a degree that a writer no longer needs to hitch a ride across the country to go "on the road"; they can instead explore the world from their laptop. Nor do they need to frequent a physical place in order to meet other writers; instead writers get together in chatrooms, message boards and the comments sections of litblogs (not mention in Second Life). Whether or not this will make them better or worse writers than the Beats or whoever will remain to be seen, but there can be no arguing that the era of the bookstore as the center (or creator) of literary scenes in over, and the dominance of the Internet has arrived.

From the blog: “The question that arises now is whether today's crop of independent bookshops - Bloomsbury's the London Review Bookshop, say, or St Mark's in New York's East Village - can become nests for new literary schools. Do cyberspace's virtual communities obviate the need for a bricks and mortar space to meet, read and exhange ideas? Or, as with books themselves, is their physical presence still an essential part of the process?”

Guardian: The bookshops that shook the world

A Wiki Novel

Back in November, Meredith wrote a post on We Are Smarter Than Me, an anticipated Pearson publication that is a collaborative effort of thousands of authors registered on WeAreSmarter.org. Today, Penguin UK launched a similar effort - its first wiki novel A Million Penguins.

Using MediaWiki technology, anyone who registers on www.amillionpenguins.com is able to edit and/or add onto this web-based tale for the next 5 weeks. Already, there are 500 posts (some by return users), four chapters, and an interlude. While there are no definite plans to publish a print version, the site has quickly developed a decent web community during the first day of launch. By opening registration to any willing participants, it’s questionable whether the material spawned will be quality ficiton, but this is surely beneficial to Penguin’s brand recognition, site traffic, and their entry to social networking.

Read about Penguin UK's wiki novel in this Reuter article.

Yahoo's Flickr Snafu

You may have heard about this already, but if you don't then the Wired article will get you up to speed.   The crux of it is that Yahoo, in building a portal page about the Nintendo Wii decided to stream Flickr photos tagged with "wii" onto the page.   

Flickr users got snarky and decided to tag a bunch of photos "wii" photos that have nothing to do with Ninendo's game console (e.g. the "I'm with stupid" image to the left, which points at Yahoo's logo).   

Yahoo can't filter out the non-Wii photos because tagging is obviously the only metadata they are using to parse through Flickr's photos and since Flickr's license allows users to retain copyright over the photos they load on to the service Yahoo can't get the tags themselves changed.   

I feel some sympathy for Yahoo here.  It is unbelievably tempting to try to tap into the popular web2.0 sites (such as Flickr, YouTube and MySpace).   Doing so grounds a corporate project in the lives of real people and quickly generates content that should be appealing to users.  And having your photo featured on a Yahoo portal is pretty much the definition of 15-minutes of fame. 

One can't help but wonder, if it had been a small internet start-up that chose to use Flickr this way, would they be getting lauded by users for their innovative idea? Or would they be harassed for the temerity of using someone else's content?