booktwo.org

Well, someone had to do it, and I think I’m the first. I’ve archived my first two years of twittering to a hardback book. (For those of you who don’t get Twitter, and those who are just bored by it’s sudden, seeming ubiquity: move along. Nothing to see here.)

→ The full photoset is here.

I wanted to test Lulu’s capacity for hardback books, to continue experimenting with the literary cornucopia machine, and to see if you could make a traditional diary/journal in retrospect. And you can, and it’s quite nice (apart from some weird kerning issues). No, most of it doesn’t mean anything, certainly not to anyone else, but it makes physical a very real time and effort.

(It’s a seriously good way of practicing your InDesign scripting skills too, all you book design nerds and Start-with-XMLers.)

When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really. This seems like a nice way to do it, and I’ll probably do it again in a couple of years time.

And yes, I’ll make one from your tweets, if you ask nicely and pay me a lot of money.

Update: Here’s the very hacky, very simple script I used to get all my tweets, as several people have requested. Use at your own risk. There’s almost certainly a better way.

I’m pleased to tell you that bkkeepr, my project to create a Last.fm-alike for reading (and more besides) now has an API.

An Application Programming Interface (API) is essentially a machine-readable version of an application, and more specifically, the data in contains. bkkeepr is first and foremost an application that does stuff with data, and bkkeepr.com is the human-readable version of that application. What an API does is allow third parties to build small applications, widgets and so on that utilise that data in new and different ways. (This is another post, but I pretty much believe that everything should have an API. And not just everything on the web. E.G.)

bkkeepr is itself built on Twitter’s API, and uses data from a wide variety of other web services, including LibraryThing, Google, Amazon and others, via their APIs. So opening up bkkeepr’s data in turn is something I’ve intended to do from the beginning.

The bkkeepr API is very basic at the moment, allowing you to do two things: get all of a particular reader’s reading data, and get all the reading data about a particular book. There’s more information about it here.

The most important function of the API, to my mind, is that it gives users control over their own data. It’s not locked up in a database over which they have no control, and they can pull it out and store it elsewhere any time they like. I’ll say that again: it’s their data, not mine, and they should have control.

It also gives people the opportunity to build cool things. Here are some examples, some dull, some fun, that I’ve been thinking about:

• bkkeepr ‘bestsellers’ – hot books, favourite books, the most read. Charts, and suchlike.
• Find a friend – who’s reading similar things? I like this particularly as it would allow you to branch back to Twitter – or any other service – and find new people with similar interests there.
• Better widgets (because frankly, the current bkkeepr badge is pretty basic).
• Reading speed – silly, because I don’t think the speed at which you read means anything, as long as you read at all, but, like Dopplr’s personal velocity, it’s a neat data toy, and could be implemented fairly easily with book page numbers from Amazon’s Associates API.
• Pretty stuff with covers and calendars (in the spirit of the awesome LastGraph).
• I’d love to see booksites implement a ‘who’s reading this now?’ widget, but realistically I think bkkeepr needs a few more users to see that happen…

There are a tonne of possibilities, and I’d love to see people do interesting stuff. bkkeepr currently has just over 500 users – not many, but I’m hoping adding features like the API and its results will draw more in. To those who say that an API is just a way to outsource the development of an application to those with more time on their hands, I say: yes. Yes, it is. Have fun.

FTW (“For The Win”): An enthusiastic emphasis to the end of a comment, message, or post. Sometimes genuine, but often sarcastic. Originated from the game show Hollywood Squares where the result of the player’s response is expected to win the game. [Urban Dictionary]

The term ‘Win’ and its antonym ‘Fail’ have outgrown their origin in FTW. In (extremely) current slang, they are used to denote all aspects of success and failure, and have been both adjectivised (“Incredibly win”) and quantified (“Full of fail”): the ultimate accolades of the emergent argot.

I’m not going to apologise for the ephemeral nature of this subject: the increasingly digital domain of our discussions means that real-time speech – the best indicator of current thought and opinion, is increasingly index- and search-able. The Oxford English Corpus, which is used to create and update our dictionaries, is a collection of texts of written (or spoken) language currently totalling over 2 billion words of 21st-Century English.

A strength of the corpus is that it contains not only published works in which the text has been edited (and made to conform to standard spellings and grammar) but also unpublished and unedited writing like emails and weblogs. Some of the most inventive uses and deliberate exploitations of language, not to mention common-or-garden mistakes, start out in this kind of informal and unselfconscious language, so tracking them is an essential part of tracking the language as a whole.

That definition again: “unpublished and unedited writing like emails and weblogs”. Some might find an argument here.

Slowly, the internet becomes the corpus. With projects as diverse as Google’s Books and Scholar, and Summize, we are indexing everything.

Win and Fail are inherently digital concepts: there is no grey area here, only the TRUE/FALSE dualism of 1 and 0. So they are the natural interjections of the techie. Stephen Pinker says:

I’m very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world. Swear words are a window on to the domains of life that arouse the strongest emotions: bodily secretions, powerful deities, death, disease, hated people or groups and depraved sexual acts.

It’s likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.

What this implies to me – and I am not a cognitive scientist, although I did study in this area – is that these ‘taboo’ words are not ‘mere’ words, simply labels for things. They are inherently emotional terms, carrying with them not only the thing itself, but an entire web of meanings and associations. ‘Win’ and ‘fail’ are ejaculations shorn of their taboo aspects – politically correct, but also precise and targeted.

Trends over time can be microsearched. What happened at 22:10 on June 27th to cause that brief triumph of fail? Almost exactly two days later, ‘win’ spikes again.

Failure, while undesired, is also funnier. Schadenfreude has its zenith in the latest lolcat-variation: the Ship of Fail and its attendants, or in the much-maligned, but equally celebrated Fail Whale. Luckily, Win seems to be winning.

P.S. On the images: I love visualisations, and Twitter is a rich data source (bkkeepr owes its existence to them and it, of course). An honourable mention should go to Twistori, which, lovely as it is, lacks win/fail categories.

I’ve been thinking about how to create RSS feeds and achievements for pBooks, almost an API. Here’s a quick, on-the-way-to-work scheme. Think Foamee. Bkkeeper monitors your twitter feed for @bkkeeper notes – just text an ISBN and ’start’, ‘end’ or a page number to your Twitter stream. On ’start’, bkkeeper adds that ISBN to your LibraryThing account and fills in the ’started on’ date. It continues to follow your progress as you read the book, then when it gets an ‘end’ message it fills in the ‘finished on’ date. Further enhancements could include blogging dog-eared pages – although limited to Twitter’s 140-char limit, less a 13-digit ISBN.

Should really finish another bkish project before trying this one, although the two would mesh quite nicely together, eh, Tom?

OK. Back to work.

So, I’ve been meaning to write about Swotter for a while. A couple of weeks ago, it finished reading the whole of James Joyce’s Ulysses to Twitter. I think there’s something kind of amazing about that, but I’m not sure what. Final stats:

• Followers: 198 (meh)
• Updates: 23,467 (phew!)

Props to the hardcore who followed it all the way. I’m not sure what to say about this, but I’m going to have a think, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Check the Swotter page too, for more info.

In the mean time, I thought I’d do a quick round-up of lit-related action on Twitter, in no particular order:

• Booktwo (obviously)
• ArtsHub – Australian creative news
• ReadersRead – book news
• Book_Blog
• Zombie Attack – an ongoing story, told by Twitter
• TwitterLit – twittering the first lines of books
• Jenny Holzer – more art than lit, but still wonderful (and I’m told it really is her?)
• 3:AM Magazine – the best lit mag on the web (slight bias alert)
• ReadySteadyBook – one of the finest litblogs
• BAFAB – buy a friend a book
• The Book Depository – your Amazon alternative
• OUP Blog – nice that it’s actually twittering, rather than twitterfeeding
• Hesperus Press – a lovely little publisher
• Brit Lit Blogs – several of the best, rounded up
• Blogographos – group classics blog
• TwitterProse – lines from creative nonfiction
• Canongate – another small (but not very) publisher
• Snowbooks – my old employer
• TwitterFiction – Great works of fiction in 140 characters or less
• Speechification – Because. And occasionally lit-related
• Technical Writing – what it says on the tin
• Screenwriting – from writerswrite
• Quotesblog – quotes for quotation junkies
• TwitterQuote – more of the same

That’s enough for now, but I’d love to hear more. Please add your favourites in the comments and I’ll add them to the list, with a view to moving this to a dedicated page at some point. Note that it’s not really a list for individuals, unless they’re relentlessly lit-focussed.

I’ve been playing with Twitter recently (and if you’re a regular reader, feel free to join me). Initially, I thought it was annoying and intrusive – and it still is – but it’s also such a simple, open and versatile platform, that lots of interesting things can come of it. And nothing gets that much use from people unless it has something going on. Does it?

Some good examples of cool stuff made with Twitter include BBC News Feeds, Weather tracking, and Twitter Tube Updates.

So, in the interest of forcing lit into every crack of the e-ther, I present Swotter: a tool for reading books to Twitter, and through Twitter, to the world.

At the moment, Swotter is reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, line by line, to Twitter and to all booktwo’s friends via the web, IM and SMS. Visit the booktwo twitter page to see what Swotter is up to and do make friends if you’re a twitter user.

If you’d like to know more about Swotter, there’s more information here.