Due to considerable preoccupation with other work, I’ve been on something of a break from the wiki for the past two or three weeks, so in coming back to it I felt like I needed to completely catch up/reorient myself before I could begin posting again.

Having returned to it, for a time, with an objectivity of absence that made me much more a reader than a collaborating author, I would just like to offer our class a congratulatory pat on the back. This thing is genuinely fun to read. The lexias are frequently witty, well-written, and interesting in their own right, and the linking system really seems like it “works” in the sense that the links mostly lead down worthwhile, often surprising paths, and getting lost in all the linking feels fun, not wildly frustrating.

Yet more in the vein of collaborative writing-- has anyone checked out Google docs yet? I kept expecting it to come up in class yesterday, especialy when we were talking about Sophie.

Anyway, Google acquired Writely--a text editing program that allows multiple people to work on the same document simultaneously, sort of a bare-bones, online MS Word--about six months ago. Since then, they've integrated the Writely features into the Google buffet of options, so that now anyone with a Google account can upload and store their documents through Google Docs. Check it out if you haven't.

In my search for online images and backgrounds for my final project, I came across a site that reminded me a lot of Shelley Jackson's Skin. The site is called Novel Twists, and it basically is a piece of collaborative fiction comprised of a total of 150 pages, and people bid for the right to contribute a page. I tried to find the ebay aunction site where this was going on, but I failed. It's probably privatized or something.

Anyway, this project is very similar to Jackson's Skin. It also relies on the premise that this is a collaborative project with a limited number of participants who don't know each other. Here, though, the participants aren't as thoroughly screened as those in Jackson's project. Rather, the winner/writer of each page goes to the highest bidder, and then all the proceeds go to charity. Quite an interesting way to raise money, don't you think?