booktwo.org

A week in, and the Million Penguins project has been pretty interesting. Penguin’s publicity nous has got them vast amounts of coverage and vast numbers of authors very quickly, although it hasn’t exactly made for a better story - reading it is difficult, and the mishmash of styles and story arcs makes for something approaching incoherence.

Nevertheless, it’s impressive that Penguin have stuck to it, and not thrown their hands in the air when the going got sticky - then again, they haven’t been showered with goatse images either. Instead, they’ve instigated a number of techniques, such as locking the wiki for a few hours each day to catch their breath, without interrupting the flow of the project. Preliminary results suggest that the open wiki as it stands is not the best vehicle for such an endeavour, but there’s no reason it wouldn’t work for smaller-scale projects - as indeed, projects like We>Me seems to suggest. The collaborative novel is off to a rocky start, but it’s not over yet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 10:54 am and is tagged with Collaboration, Penguin, Wikis, Writing. Here's a permanent link to this post, and the RSS feed for the comments. You can leave a comment below, or trackback from your own site.