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 to underestimate the impact of this book on my life.

Surfing on the Internet was the first book I read to address sexuality in a way that I understood it: queer, fluid and exciting, and it pointed to a place where others could be found and it could be experienced: the internet. Yahoo Groups, in the form of the much missed #UKyoungandgaybutnotcamp2, in turn provided the venue for my coming out, as newly technologically enabled networks like it did and will continue to do for subsequent gay generations.

So, “Homo Computers”, an event at the Southbank Centre last week exploring gay geekdom and produced by the usually excellent House of Homosexual Culture, should have been spot on—but it rather missed the mark. Andrew Hodges, the primary biographer of Alan Turing, managed to dance around the subject, failing to illuminate Turing’s sexuality or usefully explicate his work. Likewise, David Baker, managing editor of Wired UK, assessed the impact of technology on gay lives without once speaking directly to sexuality. His points about the flexibility of modern working lives increasing opportunity made sense, but they seemed to apply to anyone (and if not to anyone, then, worse, only to metropolitan media gays). His final tale was, he admitted, apocryphal: that Turing’s suicide, with a cyanide-laced apple, was the inspiration for the technology company’s logo. A terrible and unworthy thought.

Gay lives are important; what gay people do is important—vitally important to other gay people in particular—and denying the impact of their sexuality is discriminatory, stupid and wrong-headed. To pretend that Turing’s sexuality had no impact on his work is ridiculous. It shaped his philosophical outlook following the early death of his first love, and it embedded him in the homosexual subculture of Cambridge in the 1930s. His oppression robbed Britain, and the world, of one of its finest minds. List-making of ‘gay’ heroes from Leonardo da Vinci to Oscar Wilde is less fashionable now that it once was, perhaps because its purpose—to support, validate and educate young, questioning gay people—has in large part been taken up and democratised by the internet. But it is no less necessary.

There’s a disconnect here, which Chris and I have been trying to unpick since. Confusion was a problem: the House of Homosexual Culture is usually about aspects of obviously queer culture, with a camp edge. This event was part of both the London Literature Festival and the Royal Society’s Festival of Science. And such a mixed heritage led it to both fall back on stereotypes (“gays don’t do maths and science”) and to shy away from the seedier aspects.

And the seedy aspects are important, I believe. Chris has been writing about Grindr, and exploring its data, and investigating academic approaches to sexual and social networks. I’ve previously addressed aspects of this over at Bookkake in Sotadic and Other Zones (on Burton, Grindr and the sexual applications of mapping technologies), and Throwing a little fleshlight on the matter (on LoveHoney and OKCupid). There’s an absence of investigation into this, it seems, in part due to the inherently discreet and closed nature of these networks. AshleyMadison.com alone has over 6 million users. And nobody talks about Flickr.

Much of this work is being done by academics, and is extremely valuable, but to a technologist’s eye, much of it lacks technical understanding. As Chris says, “Facebook and Twitter don’t know how lucky they are to have people like danah boyd digging into why and how people are using such things, and importantly making this information accessible and understandable to wider audiences.” We should be doing more of this, on our own terms.

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One of the odd things about Surfing on the Internet, now, is its long transcriptions of chatlogs and MUD explorations—but it shouldn’t feel odd. Surfing… is a book not about the internet itself, but about our experience of it, an experience that takes place in a torrent of information that we construct, all the time, into narrative. (Remind me to talk about walking and storytelling through Wikipedia some time.) I’ve lamented the absences of such narratives from literature for some time.

I would, however, highlight two recent books which have addressed this (yes, both are written by friends. It’s how it works.) Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun (Granta, 2010) delves into the strangely queer history of the British far right skinhead movements. It makes for frequently uncomfortable moments, and doesn’t shy away from seediness. In particular, it addresses the darker corners of online gay sexuality, of personal ads, no-strings sex, and fetishism, as something intricately connected to gay modes of living.

What is occurring here is the rejection in literature of the techno-deterministic assumptions currently being attacked in polemic by Clay Shirky:

“Techies were making the syllogism, if you put new technology into an existing situation, and new behaviour happens, then that technology caused the behaviour. But I’m saying if the new technology creates a new behaviour, it’s because it was allowing motivations that were previously locked out. These tools we now have allow for new behaviours – but they don’t cause them.”

In this case, as gay men are being increasingly enabled to activate latent desires, so literature is enabled to address new narrative experiences, the fragmented, always-on, holographically-distributed society of interests and attention we now inhabit.

The other work of importance here is Stewart Home’s Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (BookWorks, 2010), which I’ve written about previously. Home’s work takes the form of a narrative frequently and incessantly interrupted by spam-like texts: “The secret to a perfect climax. She wants to be penetrated and taken harder, longer and tighter. Define your masculine identity. Click now for great deals.” Words that are in this context shocking, yet, if all our reading is taken as one sheet, form a great part of our modern, daily literatures.

Even before Home’s wider theme—the misogyny, cliquishness and institutionalisation of the art world—is taken into account, what we’re seeing here is the most realist rendering possible of actual life. In an article in the Sunday Times (thankfully reproduced, without paywall, here), Tom McCarthy laments, or perhaps rages against, the increasingly current idea that the “realism” of novels is equated with self-expression and is only to be found in “this kind of vanity mirror where liberal culture can see itself reflected back”, or worse, in the rejection of fiction entirely as espoused by David Shields. If we are to understand ourselves we will do it through narrative. If we are engaged with technology, we should take up those tools too, as ways of understanding, without prejudice.

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 includes biographical information, galleries of high-resolution, zoomable images. Take notes, save and email them. Find other readers nearby. Annotate the text, and keep those annotations in the right place – connected to the book itself, but accessible anywhere. For series books the possibilities are even bigger: linking a collection via a digital index and archive. And its updatable: the author can add in material to the book indefinitely after publication – and pitch their next one when it comes out.

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…

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, organisation, reference, feedback and ongoing management of customers for your product. It does it in a properly 2.0 way too: it’s free, with email notifications, RSS feeds, transparency and good design.

I’ve been using it from the start for Bookkake (which hasn’t done much, but glad to have it) and more especially for bkkeepr, where it has proved invaluable, particularly as the service is fairly hands-off most of the time. I get notifications of issues before I’ve noticed them, technical advice on upgrades, and even great tips on how to improve the service, some of which I’ve actually implemented. And where I haven’t implemented them, I can explain why, and keep those ideas in an easy-accessible place. This kind of dialogue with your users is pretty much essential.

There are nice extras features too, like monitoring Twitter for you – which you can do with Twitter search as well, but essential for a product like bkkeepr, and a good idea for pretty much any web-based product these days (along with Google Alerts). And the new Feedback tab – which isn’t for everyone, but fits in really well on bkkeepr – is a truly excellent invention, a brilliant execution which keeps users on your site while they give you feedback, and has produced a very noticeable increase in useful contributions from users.

So thanks to all the wonderful bkkeepr users who have contributed via Get Satisfaction. Sorry I haven’t implemented all the ideas, but the feedback has been invaluable, and all ideas are considered. If you have a similar site, or anywhere where users spend more time interacting your site than you do – which is pretty much everyone – you should be using it too.

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.

On Tuesday morning, I witnessed a very entertaining debate between Bill Thompson and Dr Nick Baylis at iDesign London. Entertaining because Bill Thompson is a shameless cheerleader for social (and most other) technologies, whereas Dr Baylis believes that technology (or rather, the uses to which we put technology, although he wasn’t very clear on this) are making us unhappy and ill.

Dr Baylis soon emerged as a book-pusher of the Andrew Keen mould, and was easily seen off, although not before revealing his patent lack of research in the subject – his unfounded belief that relationships begun on the internet were doomed to fail was particularly ridiculous, and actually rather offensive to a number of those present. Lloyd’s thoughts on Keen are applicable here too: you get out of technology what you put in, and on Tuesday I saw a very morose psychotherapist telling a roomful of very optimistic tech-lovers that they were wrong…

Anyway, one of the thoughts that came after the debate concerned the perceived distancing effects of technology and, to a lesser extent, of reading. When I was younger, kids who spent too much time on computers were presumed to be lonely and socially awkward – likewise, kids who spent too much time reading, although there was at least an intellectual air to that endeavour. As computers have become joined up, we’ve come to see technology as a connector, and while many of the old stereotypes prevail, most of us now recognise the social qualities of technology.

Reading, however, as largely remained an individual, solitary, even solipsistic activity, and it struck me that what many are resisting in the increasing digitisation and socialisation of literature is not the technology itself, but the erosion of that particular experience of literature. Reading a novel is one of the last ‘disconnected’ activities, and as we move it ever more into the connected world, we must ensure we don’t lose those qualities, of rest, respite, and introspection, that make it valuable.

The opening quote is from Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, who had some interesting things to say about writing and reading. Possibly.

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 of hundred titles in several years for WhichBook, and is all very good and user-generated and modern.

That’s as far as it goes, however, because instead of allowing users any flexibility in how they describe the book, all literary opinion is forced onto a selection of 50 or so sliders, which veer from the confusing, to the pointless, to the incompetent. Confusing example: “Is the story mostly aimed at a mainstream audience or a literary audience?” (Mainstream → Literary) excludes half of the fiction I read. Pointless example: “How much did the atmosphere of the story feel like one you could experience in everyday life or is it more exotic or surreal?” (Everyday → Exotic) might work for actually surreal books, but for most novels, the answer depends on the reader, not the story—but the program won’t know this. Incompetent example: the ‘Plot Type’ category. To what extent is the book a “Rags to Riches” story (None → Plenty), a “Pact with the Devil” story (None → Plenty), a “Brain Vs Brawn” story (None → Plenty)—these aren’t sliding scales, they’re either/or. The results are meaningless. Try it yourself, and see if the results aren’t suspiciously vague (short version: if you put in a thriller, you get a broad selection of thrillers out).

This annoys me because something so long planned – ten years in the making – with a variety of book and web industry heavyweights behind it (see the About page) really should be better than this. It annoys me that something with such a strong and correct rallying call—”inspired by the belief that the Book Trade, locally and globally, is failing it’s readers in the search for new stories and that the power of the internet and the passion of book lovers everywhere can combine into a unique service”—should result in something so poorly thought out.

Digital recommendation systems have come a long way in the last few years, and there are a number of really important lessons which have been completely ignored by StoryCode. The one they get right is user-generation, but they’ve failed to see that for user data to be valuable, it has to be ambient: Last.fm and LibraryThing don’t ask you a bunch of equivocal questions that are highly dependent on the individuals situation and whim: they just see what you’re into, and run with it. It’s powerful, and it works (why do you think CBS bought Last.fm for a small fortune, or Abe Books bought a chunk of LT—particularly when Amazon’s recommendation system is so rubbish).

The second and equally important lesson is that individuals describe things in many different ways—so let them. Tagging, while rapidly becoming a web cliché, works because it is the most flexible system possible, generating reams of long tail classification data that is individually specific but universally applicable. Tagging also provides another incredibly important feature that StoryCode has missed: an incentive to participate. Through tags, individuals handcode their own dataset; my delicious tags for example, allow me to find almost any half-remembered link I’ve ever saved with a couple of terms which are meaningful to me. LibraryThing’s Tag Mirror reveals real things about your reading habits. With StoryCode, there’s no long-term incentive to participate, and mass use is what drives these systems.

So, another book industry initiative fails to learn some of the basic lessons of the internet. We shouldn’t be surprised, but how much time and effort is being wasted here?

Oh yeah, and it doesn’t validate. I’m going to start some kind of button system for lit sites that don’t use web standards. We’re all about standards in literature, spelling, punctuation, typography – we have to get the code right too.

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 geo geek for a while, starting with a reasonably common obsession with maps and mapping and moving into more complex areas as the technologies become available.

One of the technologies that Gibson discusses, with his usual air of the near-future, is the annotated environment, the application of metadata to the physical world. And it struck me (has lately been rather obsessing me) that this technology is available, hackable right now.

Imagine a world where it is possible to access all the information about a location at that location. Standing in the street, on a bridge or in the park, your presence triggers the automated retrieval of that location’s metadata. A grid reference transforms into a list of photos, blog posts, encyclopaedia entries, literary references, forthcoming events – and people. Memories, activities, occurrences, stored in time and mapped to a location.

This is possible now. Google Books maps references to places in literary works (here’s the reference map for George Gissing’s New Grub Street) – walking down the street, I can find literary references to pubs and old restaurants as easily as I find critical reviews of them. Wikipedia is gradually accumulating geodata on listed locations (e.g. London), Flickr has rolled out full geotagging support – Dan Catt of Geobloggers reckons there are over 18 million located photos available there alone. Here’s a photomap of London. Street addresses used in events services such as Upcoming can be converted into grid references, creating future ghosts as you pass through the sites of future happenings.

To do: I think I need one of these. (I’d also like one of these, although that’s probably a way off.) Hooking together a GPS link and a wifi connection (via a 3G card, until we get a cloud over London) would allow an automated agent to crawl the web for geo-encoded data matched to your location. Microformats have gone a long way to making this data machine-readable – the next stage is to enable a Google-equivalent search for such microformats (it’s probably already out there, somewhere, I just haven’t found it), and increase the use of GeoRSS feeds.

I already have Google Maps on my phone. I already get annoyed by people asking me for directions. Just look it up. This data is available. The one thing I can be pinned down to, in the physical world, is a grid reference. I am here. If you want to find me, access the metadata. When we (you, me, the clouds of data) meet, interesting things happen.

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.

It’s a beautiful site and the downloadable software to create your own book looks and feels much the same – really intuitive and easy to use, even for novices.

It’s a fairly basic service actually, and it’s certainly no threat to traditional publishers or printers, or even to new POD services like Lulu, positioning itself firmly in the one-off, gift books category. However, it’s interesting to see another company – and one with plenty of cash if its advertising is anything to go by – taking the Moo route of offering simple, clean tools to do more stuff with all the user-generated content now available to us all through widespread adoption of technologies like digital photography. That it’s book-related just piqued my interest…

Something Twitterered, something new… Lots of interesting things come my way via other peoples’ Twitter streams, and this afternoon, via Tom Coates, I heard about Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger’s new book about “Digital Disorder” and “how we’re pulling ourselves together now that we’ve blown ourselves to bits.” Looks fascinating, and I’ll try and get my hands on a copy.

From the EIM blog, I imagine there will be some book-related stuff in there, not least that based on conversations about libraries and education and media literacy.

From a publisher’s point of view, the other neat thing I discovered was a website called ISBN.nu, which compares book prices from various online sources – a prime example of weathering the digital storm. I’m sure it’s not new and there are others out there doing the same thing, but it’s pretty handy. It’s particularly interesting that Amazon Marketplace listings get the same weighting as regular Amazon listings. I believe services like Amazon Marketplace are going to overtake established, large retailers fairly soon, once technology like this makes their listings as – if not more – accessible than other channels. I also think it will be the death of the RRP – already under discussion at the UK’s Booksellers Association conference – but that’s a subject for another post…