Archive
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 […]
The Museum of Obsessions accepts donations on loan from collectors, enthusiasts and the sentimental. The things that enthral us, but which we cannot give a home to; our treasured possessions from which we cannot bear to be parted, yet cannot keep: these are the contents of the Museum. If you have no more room in […]
Recently returned from Mexico, and still too jetlagged to write up my experiences and talk at SXSW, I present instead some rambling recollections made up from my notes on Mexico City, where I walked a lot (in one very small area of the central city), went to bookshops, and, in one of those out-of-place experiences […]
I’m at Austin airport, about to leave Texas after five days at SXSW Interactive. Yesterday, I spoke on a panel about the post-digital world. I did the books bit. It was a lot of fun, and I’m very grateful to my co-panellists Chris Heathcote, Mike Migurski of Stamen, Ben Terrett of Newspaper Club, and our […]
UPDATE 4/3/10: Newspaper Club won! Ten days ago, Newspaper Club asked me to make something to go in the Design Museum, where they’ve been nominated in the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year awards. They wanted a one-pager to give away to visitors, and I’d suggested a map for a walk starting at the Design […]
For a while now, I’ve been slowly reading my way through the works of Gabriel Josipovici, one of our more interesting contemporary authors, but one little known outside lit crit circles. If you haven’t had the pleasure, go pick up Moo Pak or Goldberg: Variations for a taste. His most recent book, Everything Passes (Carcanet, […]
As regular readers know, I’m currently in India as part of the British Council’s UK Young Publishing Entrepreneurs scheme. We’ve spent the last few days at the utterly wonderful Jaipur Literary Festival, and while I’ve got some time online I thought I’d write up one of the many talks I attended, and its associated lessons. […]
Imagine a book that told a different story every time it was opened. The story might change depending on the gender of the reader, or the sex. It might depend on the location of the reader, or the position of the book in time; the time of day, or time in years. Centuries might pass […]
I have mixed feelings about creative writing courses, but Hanif Kureishi doesn’t: “One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student.” I recently gave a talk to some Creative Writing […]
HarperCollins have just launched their online slushpile site, authonomy.com, in private beta. Authonomy allows budding authors to upload chapters of their work for the rest of the community to read and comment on. There’s been a lot of speculation about how this would be implemented, and at first sight it looks pretty good – HC […]
Flickr, everyone’s favourite photo site, just added video, and not everyone is happy about it. But Flickr has been very clever – their video offering is not designed to rival YouTube or the rest as a repository for short films, comedy clips and old adverts. Instead, they’ve limited the videos to 90 seconds to create […]
Brief outline of ideas for locative storytelling (more thoughts originating from here and here). Goal: To produce a locative storytelling experience, where strands of the story are triggered by the reader/listener’s location. Tech requirements: GPS-enabled mobile phone, or Google Maps’ new locator function, headphones, application running on Symbian or Windows Mobile (or preferably both…). Personnel: […]
Tony White, author of one of my favourite books, Foxy-T, and literary editor of The Idler, has just published a series of extracts from Balkanising Bloomsbury, a work in progress, in the Diffusion eBooks format. He writes: The ebooks are the result of a residency with Proboscis that I’ve been undertaking in recent months, working […]
In the great future lit debate, there’s one thing we keep coming back to, that we hear over and over again: “I can’t read from a screen.” Never mind that most of us spend far more time reading from a screen (as you’re doing right now) than we do reading from paper (especially if you […]
Booktwo.org, always up-to-date with the latest online literary microtrends, is proud to bring you a new subgenre: Google fan fic (or should that be fear fic?). Enjoy. Google Interiors by Sandra Niehaus: I realized with a shock that George’s hat was a dense cluster of tiny cameras, forming a rounded beehive of angled, glittering eyes. […]
3:AM Magazine, of which I am a co-editor as well as designer and site developer, today launched a new, Portuguese-language edition dedicated to writing, music and culture from Brazil: 3:AM Brasil. I meant to write about 3:AM when we launched the redesigned site back in January, but didn’t get round to it. It’s a great […]
Here’s something that passed me by, but that makes fascinating reading: yesterday was International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day (via Boingboing). On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn’t matter if it’s already been published or if […]
With little fanfare, if:book released a very early version of Sophie, their rich content creation tool, last Wednesday. You can download it here. Sophie has been described variously as the next step in ebooks, a publishing tool for the rest of us, the first base of the networked book, so I was eager to see […]
Ficlets is a new site for authoring CC-licensed text snippets which others can play with. It’s pretty cool, and what’s more amazing is it’s come out of AOL. It’s not dissimilar to Yarn, which I mentioned earlier: ficlets are shorter than short stories. Well, no, actually, they are short stories, but they’re really short stories. […]
Don’t you love it when you think of something really cool, but you don’t have the skills to make it happen – and then you find out someone already has? Back in October of last year, I suggested a couple of the projects that I’d like to see Booktwo build. One of these was Exquisite […]
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Booktwo.org is the blog of James Bridle, a book and technology specialist with specific expertise in planning and producing web and new media projects for clients in publishing and the arts. If you'd like to hire me, have a look at my CV and portfolio, and feel free to get in touch.
I am also a member of the Really Interesting Group.
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Speaking Engagements:
I am available for conferences and other events. For examples, see my talks at Interesting, Playful, South by Southwest, dConstruct and Tools of Change Frankfurt.
A complete list of talks, with links, is available.