On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft, and everyone who came, for a really great time.

I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was lost too easily. This, despite efforts like the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive (which, incidentally, is kept in a shipping container).

William Gibson spoke recently at BEA. He said this:

“If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.”

Which struck me pretty hard, that bit about atemporality, and the flatness of digital memory, but particularly our lack of awareness of this situation. I talked about the Library of Alexandria, and the Yo La Long Dia, and the National Libraries of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq—all examples of cultural destruction caused in part by neglect and willful disregard for our shared patrimony.

These losses, despite their horror, will always happen: but what can we do to mitigate and understand them? In a world obsessed with “facts”, a more nuanced comprehension of historical process would enable us to better weigh truth, whether it concerns the evidence for going to war, the proliferation of damaging conspiracy theories, the polarisation of debate on climate change, or so many other issues. This sounds utopian, and it is. But I do believe that we’re building systems that allow us to do this better, and one of our responsibilities should be to design and architect those systems to make this explicit, and to educate.

One of the ways to do this might be to talk more not only about history, but about historiography. History not as a set of facts, but as a process, and one in which, whether we agree or not with the writers, our own opinions and biases are always to be challenged

I talked about Wikipedia because for me, Wikipedia is a useful subset of the entire internet, and as such a subset of all human culture. It’s not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot.

As is my wont, I made a book to illustrate this. Physical objects are useful props in debates like this: immediately illustrative, and useful to hang an argument and peoples’ attention on.

This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future.

More photos of the books are, as ever, available on Flickr.

UPDATE: You can listen to the whole talk, and me saying “um” a lot, over at Huffduffer. The slides are also available.

NOTE: Yes, the books are out of order in the photos. Kindly do not draw inferences from this. It’s just a photograph. Seriously.

It was the second Gamecamp on Saturday, and by all accounts it was a huge success. I couldn’t attend, but I was asked to contribute something to the one-off newspaper produced for the day. The result is above, with the text below.

During the proceedings of the Fourth Situationist International Conference in London in December 1960 Tomas Coteblanc found a playing card in the gutter outside a bar in King’s Cross. As a result, he proposed the game of Long Poker.

Players were to collect cards as they went about their daily lives, but all cards were to be found: in the streets, in waste-paper bins, down the back of sofas, slipped between the pages of a book. If a cache of more than one card was discovered, players were allowed to select one and discard the rest. On encountering another player of Long Poker, hands were compared, a winner declared, and the cards burned. Those players would commence their hands over again.

In homage to Coteblanc, we now propose Long Snake City, set, for today’s purposes, in London, but playable anywhere and on any scale given enough time and imagination.

Game requirements are: any number of players (including one, and individuals or groups), each carrying a London A-Z, a die, and a copy of this map. The game begins in Battersea Park. There are no turns, only a starting pistol, and the first to reach Regent’s Park wins.

You do not have to visit every square, but you do have to travel via the endpoint of each die roll – either the numeric destination, or, if that destination is at the foot of a ladder or the head of a snake, to the terminus of each.

Any form of transportation is permitted, but foot is preferred. Routes should be recorded on the map for later verification and analysis. Players are welcome – if not expected – to make up their own rules before the game commences.

Snakes & Ladders originated in India in the Sixteenth century as “Leela”, reflecting the Hindu consciousness of everyday life. Every action has its rewards or consequences: the ladders represent mankind’s virtues, and the snakes the vices. It was introduced to Britain by Jacques of London in 1892, and was much admired by the Victorians for the ideals it embodied.

The city contains its own steps and serpents, and they will be revealed to you. Your day and your destiny are in the gift of the dice, but the story is yours to tell.

I’ll be further exploring the Bookleteer API in a future post. The code for the experiments can be found on the Bookleteer blog.

One of the subjects that came up in my thinking for SXSW, and which I mentioned briefly, was the question of souvenirs. I said then that I don’t think digital does souvenirs—I can’t think of examples of what I consider to be real souvenirs which are not discrete and tangible. And as more of our activity takes place in the realm of the virtual and the digital, there’s a growing disparity between our experience, and our records of that experience.

These records—souvenirs—are important because they serve as touchstones, aides memoires, and visual quantifiers. They remind us of where we’ve been, keep experiences in our minds, enable us to learn from them through reinforcement.

Russell Davies has written about “the way we use these little objects to say stuff about ourselves. And, in saying those things, to understand ourselves.” And in response to a brief on that topic he set last year to the Interaction Design students at the AHO Institute of Design, Svein Inge Bjørkhaug came up with a system of physical blocks that represent your activity online:

[Photo by jørngeorg on Flickr]

Your computer activity is monitored and every week you’re sent a little collection of these blocks. Quite soon, this becomes a very real representation of a virtual activity, and a set of objects to be reckoned with.

I was reminded of this project when thinking through my previous assertion that books are souvenirs of themselves. When people complain that they don’t want to read ebooks, I think a lot of this is due not to the reading experience itself—as everyone discovers eventually, the format disappears when you get stuck into a good story—but due to the other affordances the book offers.

Because the life of a traditional book is not just in the reading of it. It’s more like this:

And there’s a cognitive dissonance going on with ebooks, that they don’t fulfill those other cases, as well as the general problem of the tracelessness of electronic reading.

There’s another intersection here as well: the social timeline of the book—the reviews you read before you buy it and the conversations you have with your friends about it and so on. This line crosses the one above at the point of reading—which is also where Bkkeepr sits.

So it seemed natural to use Bkkeepr as the platform for experimenting with Bookleteer’s API, which allows automated access to its Diffusion eBook and Storycube generators.

For a while I’ve been meaning to add the ability to auto-generate inserts (or perhaps Moo stickers) that put your bkkeepr data back into the real world, and into your books once you’ve finished them:

Bkkeepr is intended to eventually (cough) evolve into a scrobbling-type service not just for the books you read, but for the ebooks you read too. And it makes sense that Bkkeepr should therefore supply you with the souvenirs of this experience too:

These cubes are auto-generated from Bkkeepr data using the Bookleteer Storycube API, currently in private beta. The Storycube API takes a set of images and returns a net in pdf format (there are more pictures of the cubes and the process at Flickr):

They represent a couple of months reading, and while I own physical copies of these titles, the intention is to stand for the ebooks I also consume, but which leave no physical trace on my shelves, and thus too easily slip from memory:

You can see how an avid ebook reader would quickly amass sets of these, which could line up along shelves vacated by the absence of physical books.

I like the bookcubes very much as physical instantiations of a virtual activity. However, as avatars for ebooks, they do strike me as a bit obvious (as well as fiddly). I think it’s probably possible to do better.

Other examples of physical souvenirs, alongside Svein Inge Bjørkhaug’s above, include the Sound Advice project, or RIG’s datadecs. These seem more abstract and less representational than getting stuck in the same book jacket trap all over again. (It still bothers me that we use book covers as the main symbol for books bought online, and even for ebooks.)

I noticed in Apple’s iBooks demo that there’s a progress bar on every page of the book:

Which is good and something I’ve argued for for a while (it’s quite prominent in Enhanced Editions) because a sense of progress is important when you’re reading a long-form piece. And perhaps this approach is applicable to a couple of other bookish problems: how do you represent the book when it doesn’t have a cover and is no longer an advert for itself, and how do you make the invisible value of a book – the time spent on it by writers and editors – visible and thus communicate that value?

Can we include metadata about the creation of the book into the book itself? (And while I’m showing and thinking with paper books and pencils here, I’m talking about ebooks.) Could the book contain the details of how long the author spent working on it, even embed its own, dated changelog?

And we’re getting into the realms of data visualisation here too, like Stefanie Posavec’s visualisations of On The Road: could we use representations not only of the text, but also of the author’s energy, to sell the book—representations which evolve further and merge with the experience of the reader to create souvenirs? Digital abstraction and re-instantiation beats tired physical nostalgia.

That is what I have been thinking about lately. Many thanks to Bookleteer for providing me with the tools to do so. I’ll be exploring their Diffusion eBooks next.

For a long time now, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film London. And so, this year, I’m doing something about it. I’m studying it: watching it again and again, mining it for references and meaning, analysing and locating shots and scenes.

London lends itself to this process, more than any other film I know. Composed entirely of short, fixed-camera shots, together with a single-narrator voiceover, it takes place over a fixed length of time (January-December 1992, a single year), and within a fixed sphere: the city I live in.

So as well as cataloguing and visiting the locations, I am filming them too. I don’t know exactly where this project will go – where it will take me – but it starts on London Bridge, eighteen years ago and last Saturday. I filmed the above, badly, in the driving wind and rain. It replicates Keiller’s opening shots from 1992. I will probably have to reshoot, and would love to do so with a cruise ship, as in the original, but I will take what the Thames throws up.

Why now? This, like 1992, is the year of a general election, a subject which the original film revolves around – and not only that, but one that is quite likely to result in a Tory victory, as in 1992. This is the one event depicted in the film that doesn’t happen – if it happens more than once – every year. But also because it feels right. Because Keiller’s vision is coming around again, bracketing the boom years.

I’m covering the project on its own blog, where you can see some of the ruminations so far, and follow the ongoing progress. Right now, I still need help locating some of the shots. They’re all in this Flickr set, and if you recognise any of them, please do leave a comment.

“London”, says Robinson, “was the first metropolis to disappear.” But the narrator disagrees: in his words, and in Keiller’s shots – the preponderance of swirling waters, and trees in the wind, set against the weathered streetscape – the film emphasises the city’s mutability, but also its persistence. It is this change, and this permanence, that I shall be exploring for the next year.

I’ve been wanting to play with Layar, the augmented reality browser for iPhone 3GS and Android for a while. So I did. As a test case, I’ve created a layar for Noticings, the utterly awesome photography game created by my friends Tom and Tom.

It lets you see and find Noticings near you (if there are some within a reasonable distance. It works. It’s nice. It’s available in Layar now.

Why did I do this? You still have to ask? Well, I have a hunch that Layar might be one of the possible ways to implement a version of Storypoints, the locative storytelling thing I proposed some time back. I’ve started hacking at that.

All will be revealed at a later date. Until then, play with Layar*, and play Noticings.

* Unfortunately, Layar is not currently available for the iPhone, unless you downloaded it before they pulled the current version from the App Store. It should be back soon. Android users can get it from the market.

Update: This newspaper is now for sale.

I have been somewhat obsessed with the eccentric figure of Walking Stewart for a number of years, since first encountering him in some dusty library, at the unpopular end of De Quincey’s “Collected Works”.

A strange, liminal figure, Stewart seems to stalk the margins of the Nineteenth Century, his own, multitudinous, works forgotten, but his footsteps echoing through the recollections of his contemporaries. I’ve wanted to do something with him for ages.

When Newspaper Club offered me another chance to make a newspaper – following the summer’s Book Club Boutique paper – I decided to attempt that something.

One of the odd qualities attributed to Stewart was his ubiquity: a perceived ability to be in more than one place at a time. Following a lifetime of walking across the known world, his final years in London were spent in seemingly unending peregrinations across the city, and more than one commentator recorded encountering him in impossible positions: sat steadfast upon Westminster Bridge, and minutes later, as steadfast upon a bench in St James’ Park. De Quincey himself records passing him at Somerset House, and then overtaking him again on Tottenham Court Road – despite having taken the shortest route through Covent Garden.

Drawing upon OpenStreetMap, styled with Cloudmade to resemble antique atlases, I collected these routes and anecdotes, and present them here in newspaper form. But the newspaper is a foldable, pliable thing, just as Stewart himself seemed to fold the cityscape around himself. And so we have maps that can fold upon themselves to delineate not only the narrator’s journey, but that of Stewart himself. Folded correctly, the maps reveal how Stewart breaks the margins of the map to travel, invisibly, through space and time.

There is also an introductory essay – a meditation on ubiquity, immanence and time travel, drawing on Stewart’s life, Jewish mysticism, Deleuzian metaphysics and special relativity – together with selected quotes and sources.

The first edition of the newspaper is produced in a limited run of five copies. Following investigation and use, there may be a second edition at some future point in time – or space…

Update: This newspaper is now for sale.

Full image set at Flickr →

A couple of weeks ago, Russell Davies noted that most podcasts of the kind we (meaning, I think, Russell, me and some like-minded folk) listen to while wandering around are quite long for most of our wanderings – typically 30 minutes or more, like the radio programmes we post at Speechification. There’s room in the world for shorter, regular podcasts – micropodcasts if you will – to fill the shorter gaps: bus stops, changing trains, a stroll to the shops, that kind of thing.

Lots of non-podcast content works well at this length – things like Thought For The Day (OK, there is a podcast of that) or Channel 4′s 3 Minute Wonder films.

TFTD – or rather, the Humanist Society’s secular version, Thought For The World – collided in my head with the daily readings we had to do at school. At my (rather posh) school, every student was issued a mini Gideon Bible on arrival, and the first lesson of every day was 5 minutes longer than the rest to accommodate a mandatory daily reading. “Today’s lesson is taken from Matthew Chapter 5, beginning at the third verse…” and so on. Together with the increased ease of creating podcasts these days, I thought I’d give it a go – with a literary bent, obviously.

Mattins is a daily reading, every weekday, no more than 5 minutes long. The 5 minute limit is imposed by Audioboo, which makes podcasting from an iPhone startlingly simple. Every morning over my mandatory first coffee I take a book down from the shelves, hit record, and read a short extract. Audioboo takes care of uploading, hosting and syndicating each “boo”, and I can also extract this quite simply by munging the RSS to a standalone site with Feedburner and a bit of Simplepie tweaking. The choice of extract is almost-random – I like finding bits I’ve dog-eared in something I read a long time ago, or a good bit I read the night before, or I might just read the first couple of pages (five minutes is a lot shorter than you think).

I hate the sound of my own voice, but I’m aware that’s pretty common, so I’ll let it go. I’m also not a great reader-out-loud in general, and given it’s first thing in the morning and I’m only half way through the first caffeine shot, it’s not exactly broadcast-quality material. I stumble occasionally, and mispronounce stuff. But it is a nice thing to do for myself, and some people might like it too.

So, here’s Mattins: a daily reading. If you like that kind of thing.

Micropodcasting is officially easy. I look forward to seeing more things made this way.

I’m pleased to announce that Artists’ eBooks, a project first mooted in this post a couple of months ago, is now live at www.artistsebooks.org.

eBooks, as we’ve been saying for some time, have massive potential to revolutionise not only how we read, but what we read. The incorporation of audio and video, the possibilities for curation, quotation, linking and sharing, the vast scope of low-to-no-cost distribution and the low barriers to entry should excite us all.

In particular, I’m fascinated to see how artists and writers respond to these new opportunites, platforms and technologies. It was in conversation with the writer Tony White that the idea for Artists’ eBooks first surfaced, and I’m very pleased and grateful that Tony has allowed three new short stories to form the opening line-up at Artists’ eBooks.

These stories, part of Tony’s ongoing “Balkanizing Bloomsbury” series, were written using a process which included cutting-up, remixing and renarrativising fragments from a number of sources including travel writing, Hague tribunal transcripts and mass media texts, to create completely new works of fiction which explore ideas of European identity. Each comes complete with notes on the text and links to the sources – allowing readers to explore beyond the boundaries of the traditional text, in ways unique to the eBook format.

This is but one example of the many conceivable routes the project could go down. We have more titles coming in the near future, and we’re very interested in hearing from artists and writers who would like advice, assistance, and collaborators to help them explore this territory. But for now, please visit the site, download the books – and send us your feedback.

*

I’ll do a follow-up post at a later date about the ebooks, strategy and so on, but I’m indebted to Liza Daly at Threepress for some invaluable advice on ebook production. I also urge you to read Tony White’s other work if you haven’t: his widely acclaimed novel Foxy-T remains one of my personal favourites.

My question is: how do you track, monitor and analyse downloads? Particularly of free ebooks?

Imagine this scenario: there’s a free ebook. It’s hosted in one place, and there’s a single addressable URL to access it. This will probably be a pointer, rather than a direct link to the actual file. This means the file can be delivered, but some analytic measure can also be triggered: recording number of downloads and their point of origin.

Yes, it’s perfectly possible someone will repost the file elsewhere, and this will be untrackable. Without imposing arcane and nasty DRM, we will have to ignore this. We’re also ignoring official (and presumably paid-for and therefore separately tracked) downloads avilable via eBook vendors elsewhere.

We’re talking about a single, canonical, trackable address for a single eBook. Are people doing this? How? Thoughts and answers in the comments, please.

*

Associated with this, I’ve been thinking a lot about artists’ books. That is, works of art in the form of a book. Ready-mades. Uniques (although the term doesn’t apply in this context). And Zines.

I’m thinking of things like the work of Mark Pawson, and Book Works. And the whole history of artists’ books.

I think there are opportunities and affordances for doing things in the eBook space, with artists. Distribution. Links. Algorithmic transformations.

So, in the tradition of marking out the territory via the strategy of buying domain names, I’ve registered artists ebooks .org. There’s not much there yet. Consider it a starting point.

Thoughts welcome.

That’s pretty much the best representation I could come up with of what I do. I encompasses all my major projects of the last few years: this site; Bookkake, my print-on-demand, experimental small publisher; bkkeepr, the web app for tracking your reading and bookmarking on the go; London Lit Plus, the open-source literature festival which ran in 2007 and 2008; Cooking With Booze; many smaller projects, and of course my work with Snowbooks and Apt.

I’ve just left my full-time position at Apt, although I will continue to work with Peter Collingridge and many of our collaborators on a range of projects, not least the much-loved Bookseer and the forthcoming and hugely exciting Enhanced Editions, which we hope, Apple willing, will invigorate and expand the provision of quality ebooks on the iPhone and other platforms (there’s more in this weekend’s Observer).

The last couple of years at Apt have been a very enjoyable and fruitful time, working on a number of hugely rewarding projects from across the publishing world. These have included the launch of Granta.com and websites for Portobello Books and Pictures; the multi-award winning This Is Where We Live film for HarperCollins; Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook online reading group; Coversourcing, the open design competition for Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing; and much more besides.

It’s been an absolute privilege to work with Peter, our clients, and our collaborators; I’m incredibly grateful to all of them and it won’t be the last you see from us, but it’s time to move on, and I’m going it alone with a number of interesting proposals and projects in the pipeline, of which more will be revealed in the coming months.

It is, as the old curse goes, interesting times. When booktwo.org launched in October 2006, it did so because of a perceived lack of action and initiative in the publishing industry in relation to ebooks and the possibilities of online and electronic reading. As the scope of the site has widened, so has the outlook of the publishing industry, and you can now find CEOs talking openly about ebooks at book fairs and business meetings, and ereaders in high street stores. This is exciting, and also a sign that it’s time to find a new schtick: when the big boys gear up, most of the interesting battles have already been fought. There’s a lot still to be done, but the wheels are definitely and irreversibly in motion.

So, as I kick-start my own wheels, I’m interested in what other people are doing as well. I’m available for some freelance work, and if you’re still not sure what it is I do, you can check out my CV and my portfolio. If what you’re doing is book-related, technology-led (or not), online or off, and you’d be interested in collaborating, please get in touch.

Here’s to books, and the future.

Recently, I did some work with Newspaper Club, the new startup from from the fine folks at the Really Interesting Group, building on their rather wonderful Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet project.

Looking to test the systems they’re working on and start building a portfolio of possibilities, they offered me the chance to create a newspaper from scratch. I jumped at the chance.

The Book Club Boutique is a weekly literary night in Soho bringing together new writers, performance poets and musicians in a suitably decadent atmosphere. Founded by Selena Godden and Rachel Rayner in January 2009, it’s since hosted everything from book launches to open mic nights, Pink Gin summer parties to London short stories, and celebrations of Gay Pride and Burlesque Against Breast Cancer. I have not been notable by my absence at many of these events.

BCB is appearing on tour at a number of festivals this summer, and Selena and Rachel programmed all the literary content for Standon Calling, a small festival in Hertfordshire, which took place last weekend. We thought this would be an excellent opportunity to publicise the BCB and its writers, and a newspaper that festival-goers could read while lazing in the sun seemed like an excellent way to do this.

So we pulled together contributions from about 25 of the best BCB performers, including poetry, short stories, a horoscope and a gossip column, and even some paintings, and with much help from Newspaper Club I designed and made a 16-page newspaper true to the spirit of BCB.

We took it to Standon, where it went down a storm on some happily sunny afternoons, and we’ll be distributing it around London in the forthcoming months. You can see more photos from the project over at Flickr, and look out for more to come…

In case you don’t read Times Emit (which you obviously should), Apt just released a fun little literary app onto the web that I designed and built: The Book Seer. I wrote about it over at TE (and had a bit of a rant about book data):

It’s very simple. It’s just pulling suggestions from Amazon and LibraryThing – at the moment. I’d like to pull stuff from more places, but it’s not easy.

…

Book data is hard, but it shouldn’t be. It’s also valuable, and that’s why Amazon ranks higher than most publishers for their own books, and why monopolies like the OCLC exist and why things like OpenLibrary are A Good Thing (and I need to have a proper play with their API). Data should be free. Representations of that data can then be used by all, and the most successfull will Rise. That’s the idea, anyway: things like this should be easier to build.

Peter’s also written a follow-up post, The Long Tailed Book Seer:

Seeing as the Bookseer is about books, and data, and openness, I thought I would share some of the early stats with those of you who are interested in such things. This is all based on the first few days’ traffic up to June 13th. (Whilst launched before then, we announced in on June 9th.) As well as being fun, I think that the data is a mild demonstration of The Long Tail in action.

Read the whole thing at TE, and of course, go check out The Book Seer…