booktwo.org

This post is going to talk about sex quite a lot. I’m going to assume you’re all OK with that.

For me, technology, literature and sex are all bound up together, and this entanglement can be traced back to a single book: JC Herz’s Surfing on the Internet (Little, Brown; 1994). An exploration of the early net, a travelogue, an explicator of MUDs and MOOs, of chatrooms and founding memes; what was still, then, the Information Superhighway. I read the book in, I think, 1995. Within a month, I had a 28.8 modem and a Compuserve account. It’s probably impossible…

Read the rest of this post →

Inspired by the Japanese iPhone/Book mashup that appeared in the Stop Press links recently, I made this rough concept of an in-book mobile app, riffing on ideas of the “enhanced edition“.

Imagine if when you got a book, you also got a mobile app that contained the footnotes and index, supporting material and the searchable text. The app sits inside the book itself. Search the app for “Leonardo da Vinci” and it points you to the relevant pages in the book. Supplementary material is accessed by typing in the page you’re on in the book. It…

Read the rest of this post →

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

…

Read the rest of this post →

A presentation you need to read, and not just for the explanation above of DRM: Date Repulsion Mode, the scale of cool, or why no one with a Kindle gets asked for their phone number in Starbucks.

Loads of excellent stuff on book data accessibility, XML, catalogues and innovation. And make sure you read the notes. Inspiring stuff.

It’s rare that I out-and-out praise a service, particularly here, but if you’re running any kind of customer-facing service on the web I can’t recommend Get Satisfaction highly enough. In fact, if you’re not using it, you’re doing it wrong: it’s up there in a select set of absolutely essential tools like Google Analytics, Feedburner and Campaign Monitor (or equivalents, but they’re my picks) that should be set up and running for your project / website / shop before they launch.

Get Satisfaction is “people-powered customer service” that provides a trackable single point of contact,…

Read the rest of this post →

However, the work—the work of art, the literary work—is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively this: that it is—and nothing more. Beyond that it is nothing. Whoever wants to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it expresses nothing. He whose life depends upon the work, either because he is a writer or because he is a reader, belongs to the solitude of that which expresses nothing except the word being: the word which language shelters by hiding it, or causes to appear when language itself disappears into the silent void of the work.

…

Read the rest of this post →

A short story for you, in a different form.

I’m not entirely sold on QR codes, but I like the interaction that they create, a physical bartering with the environment to obtain the message – providing people are willing to do so. There’s also the element of surprise inherent in uncovering the message.

I’d like to see one on a book cover, or chalked on a wall. I might print this one out and paste it around town…

[ No idea what's going on? Here you go. ]

[ More info on the story. ]

I was quite interested when I heard about StoryCode.co.uk (via Zero Influence – there’s a .com version too). At first sight, I thought it might be a newer, better version of WhichBook.net: a way of classifying books to create a more accurate “If you liked this, you’ll love…” recommendations system. The advantage it has on WhichBook is to encourage visitors to “code” books they’ve read, which are then added to the system along with the data – a great advance on using professionals behind the scenes to classify books, which has only managed a couple…

Read the rest of this post →

I’ve been reading William Gibson‘s latest, Spook Country, and it’s been messing with my mind. I still consider myself a huge Gibson fan, although I confess I’ve found him a little cold and remote since around Idoru – the virtual space seems to be becoming more cluttered, and less thrilling as our reality comes ever more to resemble Gibson’s vision. Or at least, my reality.

What has got me excited, however, is the novel’s focus on locative art, art that is bound up to physical locations through virtual technologies – virtual reality, geotagging, GPS tracking. I’ve been a…

Read the rest of this post →

Of interest to very few, I imagine, but I’m attending the BBC/Yahoo Hack Day at Alexandra Palace this weekend. Probably only the Sunday, as I’m also attending Interesting 2007 on the Saturday. Busy, busy, busy.

Very interested in hooking up with booktwo-interested parties at either. Drop me a line if you’re coming… (Also available via the backnetwork as STML). Would love to hack something, but not much of a hacker.

Additional tags: interesting2007, hackdaylondon.