Posts tagged 'technology'

Today, lazy music writers and smartphone-toting trivia cheats can commiserate over a common problem: Wikipedia has blackened the English-language version of its encyclopaedia for 24 hours.

The action is part of a wider campaign against two controversial bills being considered in the US – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Both bills are strongly supported by motion picture and music industry anti-piracy lobbyists.

Users attempting to view Wikipedia’s English articles are instead shown a blacked-out screen, offering information about the SOPA/PIPA legislation. Source: en.wikipedia.org, accessed January 18, 2012

But critics argue that whilst many may support the bills' legitimate intentions to curb piracy, they bestow upon US authorities unprecedented powers to censor online media with a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ approach, infringing the rights of innocent parties in the process. The legislation – if passed – would also affect sites beyond US borders. Last November, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt labelled SOPA “Draconian”.

Salman Khan (founder of khanacademy.org, which hosts 2,700 free educational videos on topics ranging from advanced algebra to the Cuban missile crisis) has produced an eleven-minute video explaining the proposed legislation and its startlingly broad impact. Khan provides a clear, highly visual elucidation of the laws and the ways they could empower authorities to effectively destroy websites like Facebook, YouTube or any which allows users to post comments (including yours truly).

The New York Times meanwhile has offered an open-ended discussion on the issue, with Room for Debate posing the question, ‘What’s the best way to protect against online piracy?’. Those offering their considered responses include representatives from the Motion Picture Association of America, Copyright Alliance, Cato Institute and BrainPickings.

Wired.com ‘censored’ its website with black redaction marks. Source: wired.com, accessed January 18, 2012.

With the bills to be considered by the House and Senate in coming weeks, some politicians have already changed their stance. But whether or not the laws progress further, the tense relationship between freedom of speech and protection of intellectual property is unlikely to be resolved simply.

A list of protesting sites can be found at Mashable, or by visiting SopaStrike.com, who coordinated the protest. You can scroll through a gallery of blacked-out pages at GigaOm. For a more irreverent take on the blackout, see The Oatmeal’s protest: we don’t want to spoil the surprise, but it’s an animated GIF featuring Oprah, a koala and a whole lot of love.

Earlier this week, anti-porn activist Melinda Tankard Reist sought legal advice from a defamation lawyer after a blogger labelled her a “fundamentalist Christian”, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. ‘'Why does being a blogger exempt you from the laws of defamation?’‘ she questioned.

While The Guardian last year reported a rise in defamation claims levelled at Twitter users and bloggers in the UK, it could be said that the increase is in litigious outcomes rather than in the nature of opinionated expression itself. So argues Meghan Daum in an article titled ‘Haterade’, published in this month’s issue of The Believer.

In 2004, when Marieke Hardy began writing the provocative blog Reasons You Will Hate Me under the pseudonym ‘Ms Fits’, she could barely have anticipated how appropriate a title she’d chosen as a storm of criticism, some of it rather unseemly, lingered in the distance — fed by both anonymous and prominent fellow users of the printing press/internet.

This storm struck hardest in November last year. Spurred by feminist blogger Sady Doyle’s #mencallmethings Twitter campaign aimed at naming and shaming anonymous male commenters for their hateful and misogynistic slander, a rightfully offended Hardy mistakenly outed one Joshua Meggitt as the man responsible for a concerted (and undeniably nasty) five-year-long campaign of abuse posted on a blog under the name ‘James Vincent McKenzie’. An apologetic blog post (now inaccessible) and a $13,000 settlement payment to Meggitt later, Hardy’s hater has recommenced the campaign whilst none are any wiser to his identity.

As any seasoned blogger or online columnist would be well aware, slanderous comments and hate blogs are commonplace and geographically widespread. While those proffering an opinion online are most frequently maligned, also susceptible are businesses critiqued by user review sites. The urge to retaliate against our critics can take many forms, taking the Ocean Avenue Books vs Yelp incident as but one example.

In ‘Haterade’, author and essayist Daum traces the online put-down through its historical antecedents: yet more pseudonyms, political interests and public figures including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

Whilst “the goal is to be heard, to inspire reaction and generate discussion”, Daum — like Hardy and so many others — has “a stable of regulars [who] have become so personally invested in their dislike” for her that their smears have wandered well into the terrain of her personal life. This behaviour, she argues, has rendered much comment less about “joining the conversation” and more like watching a dogfight.

But, Daum offers, if harsh and ill-considered judgement is the cost, valid criticism is the “priceless” benefit. “When ideas are given their due — that is, treated as living, breathing, imperfect things rather than written off as glib reactions to preexisting ideas — something rather magical can happen. There can be a second of silence during which we, as readers, think before chiming in. There can be a gasp of recognition that reminds us why we read or write in the first place.”

Click to read the full article.

As 2011 ends and 2012 begins, we’ve invited our resident organisations to consider the year gone by and to share their plans for the year to come.

In 2011 the Emerging Writers' Festival enjoyed our biggest year ever – and, I think, our most professional. We are just eight years old and I’m proud of how big and fabulous we have grown in such a short period of time.

Our key event, our Melbourne-based eleven-day festival for writers, grew to enormous levels, with many guests coming from interstate and regional areas for some or all of the festival. Highlights of the festival included our thought-provoking Town Hall Writers' Conference, the inaugural Business of Being a Writer Masterclass, and the supersexy Dirty Words performance event.

Our first-ever international writer in residence, Alan Bissett, charmed our audience, and we were proud to once again program the most inspiring and exciting writers in Australia today. For the first time ever we had a Festival Hub, at the intimate Rue Bebelons, and we loved seeing the bar jumping with literary conversations all day and well into the night. And of course, many people chimed in through our unique EWFdigital program also, with discussions and conversations lasting well beyond the festival.

The Festival also went interstate, visiting our friends in Brisbane for the first time. As a festival that promotes and develops emerging technologies for writers, it seemed like the perfect time to run an event all about writing and working in the digital space. We developed the idea for the Digital Writers' Conference then turned to crowdfunding to help bring it into reality; thanks to the support of our audience, we were successful.

The Brisbane roadshow was a lot of fun – in addition to insightful discussions about the future of writing at the conference, we hosted a highly-meta ‘writing about writing’ event at Avid Reader, and also ran successful social events aimed at touching base with Brisbane’s writers.

The strength of the EWF is in its community, and the willingness of our audience of emerging writers to talk, share and get involved is always the best part of our events. In 2012 we are continuing to work on ways to bring writers together – with the literary community and each other – in order to continue to inspire, inform and delight.

The date of the next Emerging Writers' Festival is 24 May to 3 June, and we’re planning lots of inspiring and informative events aimed specifically at writers. For the first time, we will be launching our publication The Reader at the Festival and continuing the ‘digital writers’ theme that we kicked off in Brisbane last year. And in a few short days we will be launching our first-ever festival prize, the Monash University Undergraduate Award for Creative Writing.

If you can’t make it to Melbourne, our Geeks In Residence (yes! we have two official festival geeks!) are working hard on creating a bigger-and-better-than-ever EWFdigital component to the festival, and with the support of the NSW Writers' Centre, we will be running a roadshow in Sydney later in the year also.

In 2012 and beyond, we will continue to grow and deliver the kind of programming that you have come to expect from the Emerging Writers' Festival: events that celebrate the art, the craft and the business of being a writer.

Lisa Dempster
Director

As 2011 ends and 2012 begins, we’ve invited our resident organisations to consider the year gone by and to share their plans for the year to come.

Australian Poetry has had an exciting inaugural year, launching as an organisation in January 2011 with a charter to promote and support Australian poets and poetry.

Some of its successes have been to deliver a high level publication, the Australian Poetry Journal, establish a website where poets and poetry organisations around the country can upload and promote their own events, run a National Symposium in Newcastle inviting poets from all over Australia to attend, manage a national Poet in Residence, Sandra Thibodeaux, and organise a poetry tour to Ireland for two established poets in 2012, Paul Hetherington and Petra White.

We initiated a Geek in Residence to develop phone applications, online activities and e-publications, established more than 70 Cafe Poets in Residence around the country, sent poets regionally to run workshops and give readings as part of the Omnibus Mobile Poetry program, organised poems on the pillows of the Sebel Pier One Sydney for the duration of the Sydney Writers Festival and run a teen team spoken word competition for high school students, culminating in an electric performance at the Melbourne Writers Festival. What a year!

Poetry in Australia has opened its doors to new poets, audiences and readers and in 2012, AP (the organisation) is excited to provide more opportunities for Australian poets and poetry, developing new partnerships and programs. This will include working with Life Without Barriers to run a poetry program for refugees and Asylum Seekers in various states and territories, building on its publications program, events program and education program.

We will continue to use technology to build the national and international market for Australian poetry and nurture our relationships with partners overseas.

Paul Kooperman National Director

While citizens took to the streets to protest around the world, there were other upheavals in 2011: not least in the world of publishing. As digital publishing consolidated its grip on the mainstream, we saw bricks-and-mortar bookstores close and online retailers swallow one another whole.

It wasn’t all gloomy news, though; in fact, the digital book industry flourished as both readers and retailers learned to adapt. While some complained early in the year of a lack of available eBooks in Australia, Melbourne-based outfit booki.sh emerged to facilitate electronic book sales for local bookstores, and digital book industry awards also surfaced.

Project Gutenberg began offering free public domain titles for download to smartphones. Seth Godin recast libraries as home of the information specialist rather than as mere storehouses for books, and predicted that eBooks would be comparable in price to Gilette razors in the future. He wasn’t the only one gazing into the crystal ball; JE Fishman offered his own account of what the future might hold for books.

Early in the year, our residents Australian Poetry launched their iPhone app. And during the Emerging Writers' Festival, Simon Groth took to the Lunchbox/Soapbox to reassure sentimental readers that their fear of electronic publishing was irrational. We continued to host Meanland events, too, including those tackling the evolution of the bookshop and the ways we write for new media.

We looked at the rise of the typo in digital publishing, while Mandy Brett argued for the enduring importance of editors, whether or not books are eventually deprecated.

Of course, it’s not yet over for the paper book – especially if you’re doing it yourself. We looked at DIY publishing more than once over the course of the year, explored DIY marketing for authors, investigated ways in which the paper book is enduring and evolving and watched with interest as mysteries appeared on the street, page by page. And as the year drew to a close, we noted Dymocks' entry into the self-publishing market with D Publishing.

As the book continues to change in our hands, there may be little we can reliably anticipate beyond further change. But as George MacEncroe reminded us, that may be as good as a holiday.

We sincerely hope that you enjoy yours.

A leading Australian book retailer is getting into the publishing business with the launch of an online self-publishing service. Dymocks is the first major Australian book retailer to have entered the online publishing fray with the D Publishing Network. The service offers a fully-functional suite of services for turning a standard Word document into a book and/or ebook. The service can print colour images, offers default covers for those unable to provide their own, and offers medium and high-quality print options.

Prices for a combined print and ebook option start at around $700 plus printing costs (around $3 or $4 per book, depending on several variables include number of pages and colour images). Once produced, the books can also be published with D Publishing, meaning they’ll be issued an ISBN, barcode and imprint and will be registered as officially published works so that they can be bought and sold. They’ll be available for sale on the Dymocks website as print books and/or ebooks at a price set by the author and, if franchise owners can be persuaded to stock them, they could even be sold in a Dymocks store. Here’s more.

The literary world has always been riddled with controversy. There’s a couple of controversies doing the rounds that we found of interest for what they say about about a new anthology of American poetry has brought to the fore age-old controversies about the vagaries of taste. A review in the New York Review of Books of the Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry has taken the anthology’s editor to task on several grounds. In reply, the anthology’s editor, prominent poet Rita Dove, has dubbed the criticism, penned by noted poetry critic Helen Vendler, as “sad”. The snarky exchange highlights the challenges of arriving at a literary canon.

Meanwhile, have you ever scanned Amazon book reviews before buying a book and wondered how reliable they are? Have you ever wondered how Amazon comes up with its bestseller lists? Here’s an article on how both the reader reviews and the bestseller lists can be manipulated by those in the know. Another Amazon-related controversy relates to the deal it’s done with public libraries in the US on lending ebooks. Penguin is so unhappy with the deal it recently withdrew ebooks from libraries.

Western countries pride themselves on publishing cultures based on free speech – but is there a case to be made that a kind of self-imposed, market-based censorship exists? The question comes to mind while viewing this comparison of the covers of Time magazine’s US edition to those of its international edition.

It’s the 48th anniversary of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The New York Times has published a short film by noted documentarian Errol Morris called The Umbrella Man, in which he interviews Josiah Thompson, writer of Six Seconds in Dallas. Here’s an excerpt of Thompson’s speculation about what the assassination means for historians:

“In December 1967, John Updike was writing [the] ‘Talk of the Town’ [column] for the the New Yorker and he spent most of that ‘Talk of the Town’ column talking about the Umbrella Man. He said that his learning of the existence of the Umbrella Man made him speculate that in historical research there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.” Watch the film here.

The Morris documentary is based on what’s known as the Zapruder film – footage of the assassination captured on a hobbyist camera by Abraham Zapruder. While it’s not the only footage of the assassination, it’s considered the most complete and the only one that clearly shows the president’s head wound. The film has thus been extensively surveyed by amateur sleuths and professional investigators ever since, despite the fact that the vision is extremely unstable. Now, the Zapruder film has finally been stabilised – although we must warn you that the content is extremely violent.

We’ve come a long way since then. Last week, a pepper spraying of Occupy protesters by police at the Davis campus of the University of California was captured on a variety of handheld video capture devices – let’s call them phones. The image of a policeman casually releasing pepper spray from a shake-up can is now a meme. Four of these videos have been synchronised and can now be viewed simultaneously. It’s led some to write about the birth of the citizen reporter – but, as Zapruder’s film shows, citizen reporting isn’t exactly new. What’s new is the platform, which is why the emerging debate about internet censorship looms as a critical one. (Read our recent story on the debate between the champions of DIY journalism and the defenders of traditional, institutional reporting.)

Far more disturbing though is footage of the public unrest in Egypt. This Guardian footage is bad enough – this Al-Masry Al-Youm TV footage may give you nightmares. “The age of authoritarianism is over, no one can tell the Egyptians what to do anymore,” says a young Egyptian revolutionary quoted in the Guardian, one of thousands of Egyptians protesting against the ruling military junta that has triggered the resignation en masse of the interim government and threatens to derail elections scheduled to be held in a week. So far, the protests have claimed the lives of 33 protesters. Here’s video of the Wheeler Centre’s recent event on the Arab Spring, where former diplomat Paul Bowker warns that the Arab Spring could take five to ten years and see many twists and turns.

A new UK publishing venture is bringing crowdfunding to the book world. Unbound lets authors pitch their novels-in-progress to readers, who then decide whether or not they want to contribute to the financial costs of having the book written and published.

The website already features book projects by Monty Python regular Terry Jones and respected mid-career author Tibor Fischer, but it also plans to make room for first-time authors too, like debutant Jennifer Pickup, whose novel Unbelievable was fully funded by readers. Readers can opt to contribute to a project at several levels, each one of which offers a reward. More than an act of charity or patronage, these rewards give readers value for money. For example, a contribution of £10 to Vitali Vitaliev’s Bad Food Tales: An Anti-Tourist Guide to Italy is rewarded with ebook edition, access to the author’s shed (essentially updates on the writing of the book) and the reader’s name in the back of the book. Readers can contribute at higher levels too, each one of which has its own rewards. The highest contribution level for this title (they vary from title to title) £500, the reward for which is “Everything up to and including launch party level & spend a day with me, learning about my work as an author, journalist, editor and presenter, include a tour of Pegasus Cottage, where I do my writing, and a special Italian lunch cooked by me.”

Unbound is the brainchild of publishers John Mitchinson, Justin Pollard and Dan Kieran, deputy editor of the magazine, The Idler, and is one of several new publishing business models emerging in the digital realm – check them all out in this Wired feature. Read more about Unbound here..

A Columbia Journalism Review feature called ‘Confidence Game’ has taken up the case for newspapers. Dean Starkman argues that a group of intellectuals he calls the ‘Future of News’ group, or “FON consensus”, is championing a new kind of journalism based on peer-production at the expense of the traditional news media. Starkman argues that this new kind of journalism can’t ever hope to produce the public interest journalism of the traditional news media – the kind of institution-centred journalism typified by Nick Davies, the Guardian journalist who broke the News of the World scandal. Starkman calls his preferred model of journalism the Neo-Institutional Hub-and-Spoke model. He advocates “[r]ebuilding and shoring up institutions” that can give professional reporters the time they require to produce journalism in the public interest. The reporting is published by the institution and disseminated and commented upon by social media.

At a Wheeler Centre event earlier this year, ‘Taking Liberties With the Press’, media commentator Margaret Simons spoke in defence of ‘public interest reporting’ but admitted that the notion was a difficult one to define. “Journalism relies on the unauthorised disclosure. That’s what most journalism that isn’t public relations is … The question is where do you draw the [ethical] line and why, and the answer of course is the public interest. But what I would say is that journalists in general and certainly journalists in this country don’t give enough thought to what we mean by that.”

(Click to watch video.)

Its title is now a stock-standard phrase of the English language. It’s sold some 30 million copies since it was first published some 75 years ago. It single-handedly invented a new kind of book, one that now sells in the millions annually. It even inspired not one but two satirical memoirs (the first published in 1937, and the second in 2001, now an eponymous film). It’s Dale Carnegie’s self-help Bible, How to Win Friends and Influence People (satirised in the aforementioned memoirs as How to Lose Friends and Alienate People).

Dale Carnegie was the quintessential American success story of the early 20th century. As a farmer’s son, he’d dreamed of being an instructor in the Chautauqua adult education movement. After failing as an actor, the soap salesman-cum-autodidact (then known as Carnagay) found his calling as a public speaking instructor, publishing books on public speaking for business. His business thrived, he changed his name (Carnegie was the name of a well-known steel baron) and became successful by teaching the aspiring American middle classes how to be successful. At the time How to Win Friends was published, in the thick of the Great Depression, Carnegie was earning the equivalent of $10,000 a week.

Despite the faintly creepy title, Dale Carnegie’s manual took a benign view of human relationships that eventually came to be emblematic of the sunny side of mid-century American capitalism. The book espoused a win-win model of interaction grounded in a Christian, ‘do-unto-others’ moral framework, stressing that, on the whole, acting with politeness, empathy, honesty and integrity – as well as basic social niceties like listening to people and remembering their names – would encourage others to behave similarly in return.

Now, the original self-help bestseller has been reworked for the 21st century – but the results may not be either winning or particularly influential. Dale Carnegie Training, the descendant of the company founded by Carnegie 99 years ago, has re-released the book for the socially-networked era. How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age offers tips on email etiquette and how to avoid the common Twitter mistakes that can damage careers irrevocably. Bloggers are encouraged to interact with their audience and due attention ought be paid to Facebook friend updates.

So how has the book been received? Dwight Garner in the New York Times laments the loss of the original’s homespun qualities: “This new adaptation seems to have been composed using refrigerator magnets stamped with corporate lingo.” Take, for example, this advice: “Today’s biggest enemy of lasting influence is the sector of both personal and corporate musing that concerns itself with the art of creating impressions without consulting the science of need ascertainment.” This sentence, Garner opines, is “so inept that it may actually be an ancient curse and to read it more than three times aloud is to summon the cannibal undead”.

An Australian writer is seeking to become a pioneer of digital publishing with a venture that’s making the most of new publishing technologies. Nathan Farrugia has an ambitious project in mind – in fact, he’s calling it ‘the future of story-telling’. The Chimera Vector is, according to its author, “a conspiracy techno-thriller of unusual depth, snappy dialogue and edge-of-your-seat action”. Farrugia has turned to Kickstarter, a website that allows creative artists to raise money for their projects, to raise $140,000 to develop the project. The money will fund an “awesomely interactive app” that will encompass an ebook, a full-cast, scored audiobook, a graphic novel with optional narration and soundtrack, a soundtrack and “unlockable content, achievements and inventory”. With 15 days to go, the project has raised about $30,000. Contributors have been promised various rewards for funding the project – the most generous, for example, will have characters named after them.

The Chimera Vector is the first novel to have been signed up by Pan Macmillan’s new ebook imprint, Momentum. In a press release promoting the project, Farrugia claims that The Chimera Vector will attempt to harness all the potential that ebooks offer: “There are enhanced ebooks, there are transmedia products, there are a few book apps with bells and whistles. But nothing cohesive, nothing integrated, nothing truly groundbreaking. Is that really the best we can do?” The ebook is expected to be launched in April 2012.

A two-day conference being held tomorrow and Saturday as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival is taking a look at the impact of digital technologies and culture on the business and practice of news. ‘New News’ is a program of events – most of them at the Wheeler Centre – that will explore a dazzling variety of topics and feature some of Australia’s most highly respected journalists and media commentators.

Topics will include political journalism (here and here), science writing, universities and journalism, innovation, spin, journalists and trauma, ‘democratic’ news, rural affairs and sub-editors, among others.

The 12th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary has been hauled into the 20th century, with a number of first-time additions to the dictionary reflecting the rise and rise of online culture. New words include cyberbullying, denialist, jeggings, mankini, retweet, sexting and woot (informal [especially in electronic communication] used to express elation, enthusiasm, or triumph). Some older words have been given a makeover: a cougar now not only refers to a species of the feline family but also means “an older woman seeking a sexual relationship with a younger man”, according to CNN.

Meanwhile across the Channel French broadcasting regulators, the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA), have decreed that television and radio broadcasters will no longer be permitted to use the words ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ as generic terms for social media. The rationale of the ban is that these words refer to specific corporate brand names and not to the generic medium, and that their use is thus anti-competitive. A CSA spokesman is quoted as explaining, “Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition. This would be a distortion of competition.”

Pioneering publications are giving us a glimpse of what the book of the future might look like – and that future can best be summarised as augmentation.

1. The Hybrid Book

In the US, the New York Observer reports that publisher Melville House has produced a series of hybrid books. Hybrid books are print books that come with a Quick Response (QR) code that can be scanned with a mobile device to access additional online features, which the publisher is calling “illuminations”. Melville House’s first hybrid books are a series of novellas, all of which are entitled The Duel. The books are all stories written through the ages by Giacomo Casanova, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Heinrich von Kleist and Aleksandr Kuprin that share the same title.

Additional features for Anton Chekhov’s Duel include a Thomas Paine essay, poems by Lord Byron, some Nietzsche, a church sermon on the evils of dueling, and a US senator’s argument in favor of dueling. Casanova’s Duel includes a Mark Twain essay on French dueling and an account of a famous duel fought from hot air balloons.

In addition, the publisher is also making a QR program available to independent bookstores allowing them to sell customers ebooks in-store.

2. The Augmented Picture Book

Another exciting publishing venture points towards an altogether different kind of future book. The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore is a children’s book made for the iPad – or perhaps it’s best described as an iPad app in the form of a children’s book. Whatever definition you choose to give it, Morris Lessmore is a sophisticated attempt at blurring the lines between book and interactive game-playing for kids. The lavish production values are due to the fact that it’s a spin-off of a film for children of the same name produced by a Louisiana production company called Moonbot. It costs just $5.49 on iTunes. Here’s a preview.

The first tablet was the iPad, right? Wrong. Developed in 1968, the first tablet was the Dynabook, and in some ways it was superior to the iPad. This is an excerpt from a piece by John Weldon on reading and tablet technology published on the Meanland website, an initiative on the future of reading co-auspiced by Overland and Meanjin literary journals.

“The iPad, in contrast [to the Dynabook], is a very passive device. It’s great for consuming email, Twitter, books and media, but it’s not very good at producing sophisticated content. I have tried valiantly for months to find a way to use my iPad in the creation of content, but I can’t. Sure, if I bought a keyboard for it I’d be able to word process, but I still couldn’t use any Adobe programs.

“Then there’s the great App con: these individually structured pieces of software that allow us to do very isolated tasks reasonably well, but which rarely have the functionality of their desktop equivalents and which don’t allow for easy integration. Apps fragment processes such that it’s like having one program that takes my key out of my pocket, another that puts it in my hand, a third that lets my hand put it in the lock, while a fourth is needed to actually turn it, and so on, rather than one seamless operation that does it all.”

This blog excerpt is a cross-post of a piece by writer and RMIT Publishing marketing assistant Amy Han on the Informit Literature and Culture collection. The full blog can be read at the SPUNC website.

“We’re very excited about the launch of the Informit Literature & Culture Collection, which will showcase the quality of Australian literary writing and publishing, and preserve the history that has been captured in issues past. Once complete, the Collection will span more than 70 years and contain over 1,800 issues and 30,000 individual items. Newly published issues will be added to the database as soon after publication as possible. Access to this Collection will be of great benefit to students and researchers of literature and poetry, arts and history and politics and public commentary as well as students of Australian studies including the historical and cultural aspects of Australian literature.”

The annual Wikipedia conference has just been completed in Haifa, Israel. Wikimania 2011 was marked by a plea from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales for more women to become editors of the site. The Independent quoted Wales admitting, “At the moment, we are relatively poor in a few areas; for example, biographies of famous women through history and issues surrounding early childcare.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Wikipedia community. According to Wales, nine out of ten Wikipedia editors are male. The average editor is 26 years old, something of a geek and is likely to stop editing Wikipedia when he commits himself to other projects and his life becomes more interesting. The website’s rate of growth is slowing now that it numbers some three million pages, but it still has around 90,000 active contributors, of whom more than 80,000 are male. The plan is to increase the number of contributors by 5,000 by next year – and to try to ensure that most of these new contributors are women.

Social media is an essential of the journalist’s new toolkit, argued Julie Posetti in a Lunchbox/Soapbox presentation she recently delivered, which we’ve uploaded to watch and hear today. In an interview published on the Melbourne Press Club website, conducted while Julie was in Melbourne for her Wheeler Centre appearance, she was asked to define the term, ‘Twitterisation of journalism’.

“Through engagement with a platform like Twitter,” Julie replied, “journalists are changing their practices. Journalism is becoming more openly reflective and the reporting processes are being discussed live on the platform. We’ve seen journalists cross traditional barriers that used to separate them from the audience and the barriers that separated one news organization from another. Journalists are discussing things with one another in public before stories go to print or are broadcast. There’s collaboration between journalists in a way I haven’t previously seen and through social networking there’s a text-based version of the discussions that go on after work at the pub.”

(Click to watch video.)

But that’s not the end of how social media is redefining credible journalism: “There are also issues around the key tenets of 20th century journalism being redefined. That includes, importantly, objectivity, which has been challenged by Twitter’s capacity to encourage instant sharing of facts and opinions. There are also issues like verification: how do you assess whether what’s being said and shared on Twitter is true? And it’s also about engagement and how important that has been in the process of transforming journalism.”

For as long as we can collectively remember, humans have struggled with the problem of memory. Its unreliability was compounded by the dishonesty and disingenuousness of the mind, in both its conscious and unconscious forms. But a new book – Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age – argues that, in the course of a generation, the problem of memory has been flipped on its head. (Watch a presentation by the author.)

Image via Mixy/Flickr

According to author Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, the problem of memory is simply that there is too much of it. “The overabundance of cheap storage on hard disks means that it is no longer economical to even decide whether to remember or forget,” writes Stuart Jeffries in a Guardian profile of the academic. Our digital fingerprints are eternal – and more efficiently retrieved and collated by commercial entities than they could ever be by ourselves. Once that tweet has gone out, as many have discovered to their regret, there is no retrieving it – or one’s reputation.

The book speculates that one adverse consequence of memory’s digital overload might well be that no-one says anything controversial anymore. “Will our children be outspoken in online equivalents of school newspapers if they fear their blunt words might hurt their future career?” asks the author. “Will we protest against corporate greed or environmental destruction if we worry that these corporations may in some distant future refuse doing business with us?”

Web writer and academic Jonathan Zittrain has a radical idea designed to give people a second chance. He calls it reputation bankruptcy, and some are calling it the next evolution in social media.

While we’ve covered the epublishing revolution many times, it feels ironic that Australia’s tyranny of distance nowadays seems to apply mainly to technologies that are designed to make the world smaller. Although our friends at Book.ish are helping the Australian epublishing scene up to catch up with Europe and North America, these regions – especially the latter – remain for the most part at the forefront of innovation.

One thing is clear – while scalps are being claimed, others are benefiting from the changes. Robin Sullivan, for instance, blogs about the new midlist of self-published ebook authors who may not match the stunning successes of Amanda Hocking, but who are doing quite well, thank-you very much. Sullivan writes: “Authors are going to e-books first based on earning potential and a quick time to market. If they do well, then they leverage their sales for larger advances and favorable contract terms. Of course self publishing is not for everyone, but at least for those that decide to go this route, they won’t have to be that one in a million outlier—if they can achieve the e-book midlist status, they stand a good chance of telling their boss, ‘I quit, I’m going to stay home and write for a living’.”

And it isn’t just authors that stand to benefit – publishers are also, according to one commentator, sitting on a pot of gold.

Here’s a list of seven publishing platforms that are currently being touted as market leaders in digital publishing. It includes Red Lemonade, a social networking site for writers and readers. Here’s another list of 40 tools authors need to self-publish online.

A couple of months ago, we reported that print-on-demand printer Lightning Source were setting up a suburban Melbourne facility. It’s now up and running. Here’s a blog on self-publishing through Lulu (an online print-on-demand facility) and CreateSpace (Amazon’s version of the same), by the author of the first ebook for iPhone ever.

Finally, here’s a great iPhone app for readers who love the classics: Penguin Classics 65.

By the way, remember the web? You know, that old dinosaur? It’s shrinking. Yep, shrinking.

This is an extract of a forthcoming essay by Gillian Terzis to be published in issue six of Kill Your Darlings, available in July.

Recently Anonymous, a decentralised collective of hackers and activists, has been everywhere – getting headlines for crashing the websites of governments and corporations alike – but also nowhere. Like an insouciant wart on the foot of institutional power, Anonymous can be irritating, occasionally painful and primed for repeat visits.

Their origins are similarly dubious. But we know that Anonymous is a loose coalition of members spawned from the swamps of 4chan (www.4chan.org): a cluster of bulletin boards where images are regularly uploaded, edited and re-edited by users, all of whom are anonymous. It is the Freudian Id on crack. It’s the place where memes – ideas in the form of a photo, video website, hashtag or phrase that evolve over time and are disseminated via the internet – are made, social mores are transgressed and brains are broken for the ‘lulz’. A corruption of LOL, lulz is the pure, unadulterated joy that comes from knowing that someone somewhere will be mortified by what you’ve uploaded. A hilarious post will unleash a torrent of replies, each one a show of brinkmanship. This is not unexpected: what is the point of social networking if not to constantly establish and re-establish one’s rank?

It was from this morass that Anonymous was spawned: an online community with no defined geographic centre and no formal command structure, although there are less than a handful of members who comprise the decision-making cabal. While Anonymous shares some similarities with 4chan – namely its focus on providing irreverent entertainment – it is increasingly associated with involvement in political and social movements. I wonder what is more astonishing: the fact that this army of trolls has transformed into a demimonde hacktivist movement, or that the movement has the capacity to redefine conventional models of activism.

As Anonymous does the majority of its protesting online, it’s assumed the majority of Anonymous supporters are teenagers and IT professionals with a lot of leisure time. Given the illegal nature of hacktivism, even my close Anon friends are unwilling to reveal too much. The reality is that anybody can count themselves among Anonymous’ rank-and-file, as long as you are in agreement with the objectives determined by the group’s hive mind.

Cover of the sixth issue of Kill Your Darlings, in bookstores in July

I’ve found this hive mind mentality fascinating and repulsive in equal measure. In 4chan, it can generate fleeting cultural phenomena – Rickrolling, cat pictures, for example – and reveal a lot about human behaviour (casual perpetuations of homophobia and misogyny are rife). But in Anonymous, the group mentality mirrors that of real-life activist groups: it is politically idealistic but capable of being focused; its livelihood under siege from constant infighting. But there are some significant differences. For instance, hacktivism requires scant physical effort or genuine political engagement. It’s a bit like tweeting about Q&A.

That said, what intrigues me the most about Anonymous is how quickly the mood vacillates between anarchy and order. Enter the Anonymous internet relay chat channel and you can witness – in real time – the capacity of the hive mind to coalesce fruitfully. This tends to happen when Anons are planning a massive-scale DDoS attack distributed denial-of-service attacks. Often, there’s a lot of juvenile name-calling – but there have also been coups and counter-coups by Anons disenfranchised by the decision-making process. When disorder threatens to derail operations, members are reminded of the two unifying concepts that give Anonymous its potency: unwavering belief in the freedom of expression and the freedom to exchange information. In a world where decisions are routinely made on the basis of information and misinformation, where moral hazard cordons off the truly powerful from the rest of us saps, information is king.But online, everyone in theory can be a commentator; no one is quite who they say they are and the rules are constantly in flux. It’s a virtual free-for-all for information. And that’s exactly how Anonymous wants it to stay. It’s as simple as wanting to ensure the freedoms we enjoy online are replicated in the real world.

The LulzSec Twitter avatar

They’ve been described as “a loose, decentralised group of like-minded computer users, who are almost impossible to track down”, a vigilante group born of the online gaming community determined to humiliate the corporate and government organisations they resent, not out of altruism but out of a malicious persecution complex, according to some, and according to others, an anarchic sense of fun. They have names like Anonymous and LulzSec (links between the two groups are disputed), they sometimes wear Guy Fawkes masks in public, and they are what happens when hacking tools are democratised.

For 50 days, the world watched as LulzSec, described as “a small group of between six and 10 people, with a clear leader (Sabu) and enforcer (Kayla), with a number of hangers-on”, claimed some of the highest profile websites in the world. First they attacked the Sony website, ostensibly as retribution for Sony’s attack on the jailbreak community. Then they went for Nintendo and a bunch of other gaming companies. The United States Senate website was next. But LulzSec was just getting started, showing up their victims' websites for their woefully inadequate security: they claimed the scalps of the CIA and the Serious Organised Crime Agency. Fox, the US TV show X Factor, and public broadcaster PBS were all victims. LulzSec took joy in their achievements, and so did some of us – their Twitter account has 260,000 followers.

Then it all began to unravel. An Essex teenager rumoured to have autism was arrested. A lone-wolf hacker called the Jester took down the Lulz website. The Guardian published the full chatroom logs. Finally, LulzSec announced it was to disband.

Is this what William Gibson termed, 15 years ago in his novel Idoru, otaku culture? According to Gibson, the otaku is “the passionate obsessive, the information age’s embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects […] Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.”

Full glossary.

An image posted on the Facebook page ‘Free Amina Abdalla’

In his 2010 book Reality Hunger, US writer David Shields argued against traditional realist fiction in favour of a new kind of fiction, one that wasn’t afraid to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. It was a manifesto that appeared to be a theoretical mirror to the collapse of fiction and reality that is occurring in the online world, where invented personae proliferate. But when the writer of a blog called ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ was recently outed as being 37-year-old US peace activist, student and heterosexual male Tom MacMaster, and not Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari, reactions across the world were a clear indication that, pace David Shields, we still expect some authenticity in our authors.

While the story has slipped off the front pages, the blog hasn’t been killed off. At least, not yet. Last Thursday, a contrite Tom MacMaster published another post. Writing as himself now, he blogged about a previous incarnation of his heroine. In Amina’s former existence (which ended in 2010), he had fabricated an Amina who was, on this occasion, a married Syrian-American mother of two. This proto-Amina, MacMaster wrote, also suffered injustice at the hands of Syrian authorities: her husband had disappeared for several days during a family trip.

In response, the silence – writes MacMaster – was deafening. “She received exactly one anonymous comment: ‘That kinda sucks’. Nothing more. No one was alarmed. No one started a campaign to free him. No one sent messages of support. The blog had two followers. I deleted it. A failure. No one had noticed. I revised Amina. Now, she was single and in Syria … and openly gay … I worked on her back story for a while before debuting the new version.” Amina mark II, on the other hand, received much more attention. Perhaps it was her youth, or her good looks, or her openly transgressive identity, or perhaps it was because world events caught up with her – whatever the reason, this Amina received decidedly more attention.

As some bloggers achieve celebrity status through their blogs (albeit of a minor order), it’s no surprise that flogs (short for fake blogs) will also mushroom. But whereas literary fiction retains prestige despite dwindling sales, flogs are the blogging world’s dirty little secret. And Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari is a case in point: a figure that for a day or two became the torchbearer of an entire nation’s tortured soul turned out to be a hoax. But in an online world that thrives on concealment, is is still reasonable to expect a clear demarcation between the invented and the real?

Addendum: we were alerted on Facebook to an article in The Age suggesting MacMaster has invented another persona for himself.

Image of vintage Smith-Premier typewriter via WikiCommons

Typewriter art has been around since at least 1867, with the oldest surviving example dating back to 1898. Mid-last century, Paul Smith, who suffered severe cerebral palsy from early childhood, was the form’s best-known exponent – at least until it was superseded by ASCII art with the advent of computing. These days, British performance artist Keira Rathbone has taken up the art of the typewriter. Here are a German news report on the artist and samples of her works, which can fetch up to €6000 (A$8000) each.

Previously.

(Click to watch video.)

In his recent Lunchbox/Soapbox address, Bruce Guthrie, former editor of The Sunday Age, The Age, Who Weekly, the Weekend Australian Magazine and Wish, gives his take on media old and new and on the Australian Murdoch press in particular. He describes the early years of web journalism in Australia as lacking in imagination – a fatal flaw in the new digital journalism environment, according to the authors of a major new report released last month.

Authored by Columbia University’s Bill Grueskin and Ava Seave, The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism recommends that “companies ought to regard digital platforms and their audiences as being in a state of constant transformation, one that demands a faster and more consistent pace of innovation and investment.” The report foresees journalism as a profession that will continue to face resourcing shortfalls indefinitely: “Journalists must be prepared for continued pressure on editorial costs.”

The report recommended that online newspapers no longer publish shovelware, that they develop more nuanced relationships with advertisers, that they embrace content aggregation but enhance their own original content, that they get used working in a leaner resourcing environment, that they invest in multiple mobile delivery platforms, and that paywalls be introduced alongside an enhanced content experience. Here’s some analysis by Forbes blogger Nathaniel Parish Flannery and a slightly more critical response from Reuter’s Felix Salmon.

Federal Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry predicted this morning that online shopping will wipe out bookstores within the next five years. Senator Sherry made the comments at the launch of a campaign called Driving Business Online, an initiative intended to encourage small business owners to develop the online side of their business.

The Australian Booksellers Association’s CEO Joel Becker said he was “gobsmacked” by the minister’s comments, while ABA president Jon Page, of Pages and Pages Booksellers in Sydney, added, “I think there’s still a place for an independent that services their local community”. The ABA has launched an initiative of its own – National Bookshop Day, on August 20 – the focus of which will be “celebrating bookshops, their contributions to the local community and to Australian literature, culture and society.”

A few weeks ago, the Wheeler Centre hosted a fascinating Meanland event on the future of the bookshop. Here’s the video:

(Click to watch ‘Meanland: The Evolution of the Bookshop’.)

Image of Smith-Premier typewriter via WikiCommons

There’s a revival going on – our favourite type of revival, the type that appeals to old-fashioned types like us. Just as the technology that brings us music has passed from vinyl to CD to downloadable file in the space of a generation, so too has the technology under the keys stroked untold times by untold fingers that make up the written word. But it seems that – just like vinyl – the humble typewriter is making something of a comeback. We’ve covered the subject in the Dailies before, touching on the Sticky Institute’s I Am Typewriter festival as well as the deep attachment writers like Cormac McCarthy and Gunter Grass have for their machines.

The revival consists of Type-Ins such as this one in Philadelphia, where typewriter lovers get together to do what what typewriter lovers do best. Collectors buy and sell antique typing machines on coolly-designed websites and in bricks and mortar stores. Other sites devoted to the typosphere are not quite so coolly-designed but no less enthusiastic. Lately we spotted not one but two compilations of photographs of writers sitting at and working on their fandangled writing machines. And here’s a lovely photo gallery of typewriters being bought and sold at the Brooklyn Flea market. Of course, some writers never stopped writing on a typewriter.

Could we have just witnessed the birth of virtual reality tourism? Television channel 13th Street Universal, which specialises in thriller and crime content, has produced an augmented reality film called The Witness. The film is one part film, one part public event, one part interactive video game and one part city tour – in this instance, Berlin. Touted as “the first movie of the outernet”, the film, which can only be viewed on an iPhone, has a storyline that with themes including organised crime, kidnapping and sex trafficking. According to blogger Benjamin Starr, viewer-participants become witnesses to a kidnapping: “It’s then their job to track down the victim, finding clues, communicating with other participants and viewing other scenes on location”.

At this stage, the ‘film’ can only be experienced as a German language only organised event. Applications for the next ‘screening’ open April 9 – all part of an innovative campaign to promote the relaunch of the German 13th Street television channel. The mind boggles at the possibilities: filmmakers and game developers making augmented reality interactive films for cities across the world – and tourists travelling to a city specifically to experience the best and most popular games.

On 1 March, EU inspectors conducted raids in the offices of publishers across Europe. The EU explained the raids were motivated by concerns that ebook publishers “violate EU anti-trust rules that prohibit cartels and other restrictive business practices”. Here’s how the Guardian saw it.

Last year, a stand-off occurred that pitted Amazon against publishers. Publishers were concerned that Amazon might become a monopoly retailer of ebooks online. Amazon blinked first, and the result was something that’s come to be called the agency model. In the agency model, publishers set the retail price of an ebook, whereas they only set a wholesale price for print books. The new status quo seemed to have bought publishers a stay of execution. However, the EU raids earlier this month suggests it’s a fragile truce. This New Yorker feature provides good background.

The raids are just the tip of the iceberg as far as publishers are concerned. There is mounting evidence of consumer dissatisfaction over epublishing. Some argue the discontent encourages book piracy. Others disagree, arguing piracy is unavoidable and already widespread. Some Kindle users are jailbreaking the device, which might be free by November. Common reasons for ebook customer dissatisfaction include lags in the digitisation of books and the way publishers have divvied up the online market by geographical region. The website Lost Book Sales encourages readers who have been unable to purchase the book they wanted for one reason or another to register their experience as a missed revenue opportunity.

The dissatisfaction is being felt at the other end of the market too – among authors. Authors like Seth Godin are starting their own publishing imprints. Competition is driving the price of ebooks down – here’s an article on how 99 cent books account for about a fifth of the 100 bestselling titles on Amazon. Other sites – see here and here – give authors a DIY way of self-publishing online. If you’re an independent author with a sense of adventure, there’s plenty of advice online about how to go it alone.