Mar
26th
Wed
26th
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime
— Machiavelli
Mar
21st
Fri
21st
Gene Shay, co-founder and host of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, defined folk music in an April 2003 interview by saying: “In the strictest sense, it’s music that is rarely written for profit. It’s music that has endured and been passed down by oral tradition. […] Also, what distinguishes folk music is that it is participatory—you don’t have to be a great musician to be a folk singer. […] And finally, it brings a sense of community. It’s the people’s music.
Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, recently said that he had been leaking his own books to BitTorrent (a peer-to-peer downloading site) behind his publisher’s back, and that this had been helping him sell books. He has since created a Web site where his books can be downloaded for free. In Russia, after he made a Russian translation of The Alchemist available on his Web site, Coelho went from selling 1,000 physical copies of The Alchemist a year to selling 1 million copies of all of his books within three years. Now he sells 10 million books a year in Russia.
— same as below
The kind of boundaries that used to exist in capitalism are breaking down. Capitalism used to be about whoever owns the means of production calls the tune. Now, it’s about the quality of the ideas you produce. It’s about creativity.
— From interview with Matt Mason (“The Pirates Dilemma”) called “We Are All Pirates”
Mar
19th
Wed
19th
The problem with most collaborative narratives is that someone can just come online and kill off one of the characters. If you do a linear narrative, you have to edit everything, so that no one can alter the story more than everyone else wants. A collaborative novel just doesn’t work in a line – giving one contributor 100 words, and giving the next another 100 words. It becomes this weird one-upmanship. But collaborative story-telling does work for a nested narrative.
The annotations ended up telling a story about what the future world was like in a much more mosaic way than through a linear story.
“Digital Narratives” (blog)
This is a blog for exploring the many ways that digital media are transforming narratives, for example hypertexts, gaming, fanfiction, online archives, mash ups, digital storytelling, performance art on the web, blogging and more.
…even further down the right path… now just to find out how to merge this with modern, collaborative, open source folk music (if someone else isn’t doing it already).
Taking Open Source to Every Front
A relatively recent interview with Douglass Rushkoff about “the notion of crowdsourcing, Open Source Religion, and collaborative narratives.” Sounds interesting. What is crowdsourcing? I don’t know, I’ll have to read and find out. Collaborative narratives… another term I seem to have been looking for…
