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In 1928, a cartoon character was born. An early Mickey Mouse made his debut in May of that year, in a silent flop called /Plane Crazy/. In November, in New York City’s Colony Theater, in the first widely distributed cartoon synchronized with sound, /Steamboat Willie/ brought to life the character that would become Mickey Mouse. Synchronized sound had been introduced to film a year earlier in the movie /The Jazz Singer/. That success led Walt Disney to copy the technique and mix sound with cartoons. No one knew whether it would work or, if it did work, whether it would win an audience. But when Disney ran a test in the summer of 1928, the results were unambiguous. As Disney describes that first experiment, “A couple of my boys could read music, and one of them could play a mouth organ. We put them in a room where they could not see the screen and arranged to pipe their sound into the room where our wives and friends were going to see the picture. “The boys worked from a music and sound-effects score. After several false starts, sound and action got off with the gun. The mouth organist played the tune, the rest of us in the sound department bammed tin pans and blew slide whistles on the beat. The synchronization was pretty close. “The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric. They responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!”

— Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture

I’ve just started reading Free Culture (yup, on my phone), and it’s really good. If, like me, you’re very into all this CC-licensing and democratisation of content, but don’t actually know too much about the legal, historical and cultural background, you should give it a try too.

The above quote seemed startlingly appropriate to much of booktech and the wider internet’s attempts to do cool, new things and do them now. The results aren’t always pretty, but they’re often thrilling, and groundbreaking, and point the way to more exciting and new things. Of course, “terrible and wonderful” is not a good pitch to anyone corporate, which is why it’s taking the big guys a long time to turn the boat around.

But not, of course, Penguin. Head over to wetellstories.co.uk and check out the first installment of their six web-based tales, a Google Maps-based adventure from Charles Cumming. Sure, I’m not wild about aspects of the interface (the neophobes should have a field day with all the ‘reticulating splines’) but this is about as new and exciting as it gets.

Jeremy Ettinghausen just announced Penguin’s new Facebook page over at the Penguin blog with a particularly apposite and self-effacing quote:

“Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies … But they became extinct.”
“Extinct?”
“We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters. They went the way of geography in general…”
— William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties

I loathe Facebook (yes, I have a profile), and the new product pages are one of the clumsiest, least elegant, most obnoxious ideas to hit the net for a while - proclaiming yourself a fan of a brand, much like all the tools driving branded sports cars around Second Life. You can build yourself a rocket ship! Why are you driving an Accura? That’s pretty much how I feel about dragging corporate entities into social spaces.

But that’s clearly a personal view that isn’t reflected in any way by the vast majority of FB users, who will in all likelihood plaster their homepages with the same blinking corporate tattoos that their supposed inferiors on Myspace have been pasting up for years. Because - and this is what I’m afraid of - Gibson was off by one remove: it’s people not marketers who are commodifying their spaces. People prefer to feed on this stuff than build their own glittering backwaters. A colossal failure of imagination is occurring, but it’s in our own heads, not in that of some ingenious, impersonal, infernal marketeer.

Where’s my goddamn rocketship?

Things I Love (a short and selective list): Blogging, Wordpress, Books, Penguin paperbacks, Typography.

I am, therefore, quite over the moon to announce the release of Marber, a theme for the Wordpress blogging platform based on good typographic practices and Romek Marber’s classic 1961 grid for Penguin Books.

Marber is a real labour of love, and I’ve been working on it for some time. Despite setting up tens of Wordpress installations, all with customs themes, this is my first publicly-available theme, and I look forward to seeing how it fares. You can find out a lot more about the theme in a longer introduction over at Times Emit.

→ Marber Demo
→ Marber Info, Download & Instructions

And so it ends. But what a work of genius.

I can’t help but hear a rueful quality in the words of Penguin’s Chief Executive: ‘not the most read, but possibly the most written novel in history’. Basically, that’s a publisher’s worst nightmare.

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 morning, Penguin announced the launch of A Million Penguins, a wikinovel project in association with De Montfort University.

Students from De Montfort’s MA in creative writing form the basis of the projected community of writers, which will edit and expand upon the short first chapter provided over a period of six weeks. (I think six weeks - the timescale is a little unclear. Rather sweetly, they’ve left lots of setup notes on their blog, such as the inspiration gained from this Lost fan wiki.) The students will also form the core moderators of the project, which should help prevent edit wars.

The project is another brainchild of Penguin’s Digital Publisher Jeremy Ettinghausen, who’s also behind Penguin’s extensive Second Life presence and other forward-thinking projects. Viking editor Jon (no surname given) will be guiding the project, acting as a regular editor, giving ideas on direction and revision. Knowing what editing one author’s work is like, I don’t envy the job of doing the same for a potentially massive authorbase (we need some new mass nouns here). He’s certainly open-minded about the end product, as long as it doesn’t turn out to be a “robotic - zombie - assassins - against - African - ninjas - in - space - narrated - by - a - Papal - Tiara type of thing”. Shame.

The Guardian obviously obviously got the wrong end of the stick as it reports that “Ettinghausen is emphatic that the experiment has not been set up by Penguin as an online literary Pop Idol,” and Editor John also stresses that “the wikinovel experiment is not a place to prove to Penguin we should publish your book.” This is clearly more in the spirit of the networked book (or, dare we say it, Booktwo’s own, terminally alpha projects), and it seems unlikely that Penguin will get a novel out of it that they would consider publishing in the mass market - “To be honest, we don’t know exactly what is going to happen or how this will turn out”- all the more kudos to them for trying it, then.

I’ll be keeping a regular eye on the project, and trying to make sense of it as it evolves. I’m still looking forward to the network novel that won’t play merely with authorship but with structure too; that explores the potential of technology to change not just how novels are written, but how they are read. In the end, the product of A Million Penguins is unlikely to look very different to a regular novel - but it’s a great place to start.