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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,

…

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Steve over at the Gilbane Publishing Practice Blog has a long post on the experiences of the the We Are Smarter Than Me project. We>Me, which I wrote about last year, is (was?) a project by MIT, Pearson and others to build a community to write a book about how building communities could help businesses. The results, as Gilbane tells it, are interesting.

Firstly, it became clear to the steering committee that they had to relinquish all control of the project to the community in order for the community to flourish. There can be…

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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…

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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…

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Friday saw the launch of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, an organisation dedicated to understanding how to take advantage of “collective intelligence… new communication technologies – especially the Internet – [which] now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways.” One of their first projects is We Are Smarter Than Me, a collaborative effort by to write a “network book” – a book written by multiple authors, leveraging their experiences and intelligence to create a new kind of textbook (which, in this case, already has a publishing deal – Pearson, 2007)….

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