Robin Sloan

What’s a media inventor?

Just a note that if you’re new here, you should check out Annabel Scheme and Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-​​Four-​​Hour Book Store.

Also: what’s a media inven­tor, any­way? Here’s my (totally made-​​up) def­i­n­i­tion: It’s some­body pri­mar­ily inter­ested in con­tent who also exper­i­ments with new tech­nol­ogy, new processes, and new for­mats. Allen Lane was a media inven­tor. Early blog­gers were media inven­tors. Right now, the indie video game scene is full of media inventors.

Fun­da­men­tally, I think, a media inven­tor is some­one who isn’t sat­is­fied with the suite of for­mats that have been handed down to him by his cul­ture (and econ­omy). Novel, novella, short story; album, EP, sin­gle; RPG, RTS, FPS—a media inven­tor doesn’t like those choices. It turns out a media inven­tor feels com­pelled to make the con­tent and the container.

Some­thing like that, anyway.

Update: Frank Chimero con­nects media inven­tion to Car­men Sandiego and Cit­i­zen Kane. 

Bravery, foolishness, hubris

Wow, I owe you an update. There’s cool stuff going on—and I’ll post about it soon. But for now, check out this piece by Eric Rosen­field. It’s pretty self-​​aggrandizing to even link to it, but I’m okay with that. I liked this bit:

…in Annabel Scheme there are plot prob­lems, an uneven­ness of style, sen­tences that don’t quite make sense or seem to be miss­ing a verb. In other words, it reads like a draft in need of an edi­tor, with the rough edges of a novice writer that will hope­fully be sanded down as he con­tin­ues to develop. The fact that he would even con­sent to release some­thing to the pub­lic at this stage speaks some­thing to his brav­ery, fool­ish­ness or hubris, depend­ing on your perspective.

I was think­ing about this on Sun­day, and I decided it’s none of the above, and def­i­nitely not brav­ery. I think it’s the oppo­site, in fact. When you keep some­thing to your­self (for years?!) and then present it to the world with the implicit claim that it’s, you know, FINISHED—perfect—man, that takes brav­ery. And hubris, and (I think) more than a lit­tle fool­ish­ness. That’s div­ing into the deep end. And there’s a place for that, but me, I’d rather ease my way into the swim­ming hole, feel­ing the bot­tom as I go. Bring­ing my posse with me.

Any­way, read Rosenfield’s piece; it’s really nice. More news to come.

Investigating narrative with code

Wow. This is so awesome.

Matt Katz had a hypoth­e­sis…

Maybe microblog­ging pushed [Robin] to write bet­ter, snap­pier sentences?

…so he made a plain-​​text ver­sion of Last Beau­ti­ful, parsed it with Python, and posted the result as a Google Spread­sheet. All in like 20 minutes.

The result? Hypoth­e­sis con­firmed, because fully 75% of my sen­tences are under 140 characters.

This is my new favorite thing.

Here’s the orig­i­nal. I’m work­ing on v1.1 right now.

PSA

So:

• Yes, I know I’m late on the weeknote!
• Yes, I know I never posted Emily Cooper’s amaz­ing images!

Both are on deck for tonight. Pre­pare thyself.

Silicon Valley fiction

Two things:

• The Lost Books of the Odyssey sounds super-​​great. Just bought it. Its author, Zachary Mason, is a com­puter sci­en­tist in Moun­tain View.
• Look out New York: We are com­ing for you.

An important @robinsloan update

Hey, I’m going to go work at Twitter!

So, there are at least three things to cover. First: doing what, exactly? Sec­ond: what of all this around us—what of the vast robinsloan​.com empire? Third: whoah, let’s talk about how cool Twit­ter is! We’ll take it, as always, bird by bird:

First: doing what?

I’m going to be work­ing on media part­ner­ships with my friend and erst­while col­league @ChloeS. This couldn’t be cooler: it’s every­thing at the inter­sec­tion of Twit­ter and media, from live events on TV to cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism on the web to Na’vi tweets in IMAX 3D. (Just kidding—but you know Twit­ter is Eywa, right?)

Back at Cur­rent in 2008, Chloe was the mas­ter­mind behind our Twitter-​​powered elec­tion pro­gram­ming—prob­a­bly my sin­gle favorite project in all the years I worked there. So I’m hugely excited to be con­spir­ing with her again, and (soon) with all the pro­duc­ers, reporters, devel­op­ers and strate­gists at media orga­ni­za­tions that want to do cool, trans­for­ma­tive things with tweets.

Sec­ond: whither robinsloan​.com?

Don’t worry: all of this work con­tin­ues! I’m still plug­ging away on Pil­grim and still com­mit­ted to media inven­tion on a monthly basis. (iPad, hello?) This is def­i­nitely not a zero-​​sum game; in fact, I think Twit­ter is prob­a­bly the per­fect perch for a per­son inter­ested in—you know—words and tech­nol­ogy.

Third: wooo Twitter!

I’m excited to go work at Twit­ter because it’s a sys­tem and a ser­vice that I actu­ally, er, love. (Maybe you knew that already.) Now, okay, you don’t need me to tell you that Twit­ter is fun and use­ful. Got it. But let me just under­score three things that I think make it really, really special:

• Twit­ter is built around this one odd, remark­able constraint—and if you ask me, almost all of its magic flows from that fact. Maybe once it was entirely a tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tion, an SMS thing. I think it’s become more than that. Frankly, I think it’s become poetry. Twit­ter makes me stop and think about lan­guage more fre­quently and more deeply than any other tech­nol­ogy in the world. What a great thing for a tech­nol­ogy to do—what a very human thing.
• I feel like I’m con­stantly learn­ing and re-​​learning how to use Twit­ter. And I think that’s because, paired with this odd con­straint, you’ve got this crazy openness—this refusal to spec­ify exactly what you’re sup­posed to do with the ser­vice, or how, or even why. So those deter­mi­na­tions fall to us, and as a result, the whole thing seems to be con­vuls­ing and trans­form­ing, like, every six months. Do you remem­ber when hardly any tweets had an http://? It wasn’t that long ago—but now whole ecosys­tems have sprung up around the busi­ness of prepar­ing links for Twit­ter. That kind of fast, organic change indi­cates real health and strength. It’s also just really fun! Like a good story, with that cen­tral, dri­ving ques­tion: What hap­pens next?
• I’m not a great pro­gram­mer, but I do dive in from time to time, and my first hands-​​on expe­ri­ence with the Twit­ter API, back dur­ing the elec­tion, was a rev­e­la­tion. Using ludi­crously sim­ple tools, and with­out ask­ing any­body for per­mis­sion, you can plug into this thing and get—well, jeez. You can get life. I don’t think there’s another API in the world that’s so sim­ple but so vital. And hon­estly, I don’t think we’ve come close to har­ness­ing all that it has, and will have, to offer.

So, those are all things I would have told you even if I wasn’t going to go work at Twitter—but they should help make it clear why I’m so excited that I am.

Okay, that’s the update. I’m going to con­tinue my wee­knotes here, but they will change in char­ac­ter some­what. There will no longer be any­thing about the per­ils and prac­ti­cal­i­ties of being your own busi­ness, obvi­ously. Instead, they’ll sim­ply chron­i­cle my “extracur­ric­u­lar” writ­ing and invent­ing, and the process behind it.

And as for all the cool Twit­ter media part­ner­ship work ahead: there will be a place to talk about that, too! When it’s ready, I’ll point you to it.

I start in mid-​​February.

Now I’m going to go tweet about this.

“Robin Sloan decided…”

You know it’s either really good or really bad when the arti­cle begins with “Robin Sloan decided…”—and it all depends on the next few words.

“…one day in Octo­ber that he could be the falafel-​​eating cham­pion of the world.”

“…that the Somali pirates were doing it wrong.”

“…to raise llamas.”

It’s not so dramatic—yet. Here’s the arti­cle: a sharp piece about Kick­starter by Chris­tine Lago­rio in today’s San Fran­cisco Chronicle.

And here is the part of the mod­ern media rit­ual where the blog­ger offers a few small for-​​the-​​records:

• To say “Sloan didn’t have high hopes when he posted to Kick­starter” isn’t exactly right; it seems to pin the doubt on Kick­starter. Rather, that first night, after I had posted the project but before I’d fallen fit­fully to sleep, I had hopes—I just wasn’t sure they’d amount to anything!
• Chris­tine writes that my inspi­ra­tion was “see­ing [my] friend Web entre­pre­neur Andy Baio post a project on Kick­starter” and this is 100% cor­rect, except that I don’t want Andy to think I am claim­ing him as a friend—“Wait, who?”—so let’s be clear: He is merely my nerd guru.

Finally, here is the pic­ture from the paper, for your locker. I feel that I look some­what Gollum-​​like here—

—but that’s my fault, not pho­to­jour­nal­ist Jana Asenbrennerova’s.

Grand designs

Try­ing out a new design for robinsloan.com—click over if you’re see­ing this in Google Reader (or sim­i­lar) and let me know if it, uh, breaks your browser. I’m also get­ting more ambi­tious with the site. You’ll see more (and dif­fer­ent kinds of) updates from now on.

Thanks for stick­ing around—especially when it was so quiet for so long!

Update: Uh. Big IE bug. But I’ll fix it tomorrow.

Real-​​time writing and Facebook memorials

A lit­tle writ­ing exper­i­ment here. I was so taken with this new Face­book fea­ture today—the abil­ity to turn a pro­file into a memo­r­ial after some­one dies, and the info that Face­book asks for in the process—that I just felt 100% com­pelled to write some­thing. No time to do a full story, so I dashed off a quick scene, a setup.

(You can skip straight to it if these process notes don’t inter­est you.)

The fun part is that I asked peo­ple for some quick feed­back on Twit­ter and wow—they deliv­ered! Using this form, I got six­teen really thought­ful responses in a mat­ter of min­utes. (I’d show them to you, but I never indi­cated to my on-​​demand review­ers that their responses would be made pub­lic, so I’m going to honor the assump­tion of pri­vacy. Seri­ously, though: so thoughtful.)

None of the feed­back said “meh” or “blech” so I decided to spend just a bit more time on it and address some of the prob­lems that peo­ple iden­ti­fied. I am not assum­ing that any­one will actu­ally want to com­pare these, but just for the sake of shar­ing the process: here’s v1 in Google Docs, the result of about 40 min­utes of rushed typ­ing; and here’s v2, with about another 40 min­utes of work put into it.

Any­way, I’m not sug­gest­ing this is great lit­er­a­ture, but I had fun with the process, and I actu­ally think there’s some­thing inter­est­ing about being able to “metab­o­lize” stuff that’s very in-​​the-​​moment and make a story (or story-​​stub) out of it. And that really means being able to ask for feed­back, and get it, in near-​​real-​​time.

I wish I could keep writ­ing this story—I’m curi­ous to know what hap­pens next—but I’ve got to fin­ish this book and I’ve already spent an irre­spon­si­bly large amount of time on this today.

Any­way! Enough meta-​​discussion. On to the story-​​stub.

Read on…

Smithsonian stories

Oh man. On Twit­ter, @Smithsonian linked to The Wrong Plane. Talk about ulti­mate sat­is­fac­tion. One of the key facts in the story—I won’t tell you which one because it’s a mini-spoiler—came from this talk by Wayne Clough, Sec­re­tary of the Smithsonian.

Stories about our time, over time

Super-​​thoughtful notes on Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-​​Four-​​Hour Book Store by Nav over at his blog Scrawled in Wax. Read­ing them, and the thread that fol­lows, I found myself think­ing: Ooh, can’t wait to fold this into the next ver­sion of the story.

Then I real­ized that what seems com­pletely obvi­ous and nat­ural at this point—“the next ver­sion of the story”—is pretty atyp­i­cal, historically.

Or is it? Are there any writ­ers famous for revis­ing, for releas­ing mul­ti­ple ver­sions of the same story?

In any case: I’m tak­ing notes for Mr. Penum­bra 2.0. It’s not an imme­di­ate pri­or­ity, but I’ll do it at some point. And I can’t wait.

Ready, steady, go

Okay, now that I’ve launched my Kick­starter project (already 60% funded!) I’m going to kick the tempo up a bit here on robinsloan​.com.

Just a reminder that you can find links to art and jour­nal­ism I like, as well as var­i­ous meta-​​media mus­ings, over at Snark­mar­ket, along­side lots of smart stuff from Tim and Matt. (If you’re not sub­scribed to the feed, you should be.)

And I’m still not sure exactly what I’m doing with Twit­ter, but, er, yeah.

So, what’s this site? I’m going to use it as a kind of live writ­ing note­book. I’ll post some things to Kick­starter, too, but when I do I’ll include a link here as well.

Next up: sta­tis­ti­cal char­ac­ter naming.

Kickstarter launch: I’m writing a book

It begins! I’m writ­ing a book, and I’m doing it through Kick­starter.

Here’s the core of it: I’m going to take the techno-​​spooky vibe of Mr. Penumbra’s San Fran­cisco and deepen it—darken it—build it out into some­thing big­ger and better.

There’s a video intro, so come take a peek.

I have to say, build­ing this project has been an oppor­tu­nity to explore Kick­starter more deeply, and wow: I am so impressed. It’s seri­ously becom­ing a data­base of dreams. I’m par­tic­u­larly taken with the projects put forth by peo­ple who clearly aren’t hard-​​core web self-​​promoters. They tend to be sort of ten­ta­tive: “Er, hello? Any­body out there?”

I’m telling you: Find one of those projects, drop a dol­lar or five in the bucket, and you will have made somebody’s day—week—month—life.

Why hello

I’m start­ing this microblog up again!