Wed 22 Jul 2009
Random House is set to release fourteen unpublished shorts by Vonnegut as serial e-books starting end of August this year. As Dave Itzkoff poignantly describes; “In a twist that Kurt Vonnegut, the master satirist, would have appreciated, he continues his career despite the apparent impediments to his productivity.”
Mon 6 Jul 2009
David Pogue, author, New York Times columnist and CBS news reporter, is on a mission to get to know his followers. Yes… doesn’t that sounds creepy ?
Twitter is often thought-of as a unidirectional communication channel. Mostly by people who are not on Twitter. When Pogue was speaking in a seminar and wanted to demonstrate the imminence of the Twitter community, he asked for the best 140-character pun. The reactions started to flow in. He repeated with other questions and realised that he was actually displaying communication with the masses.
His Twitter followers turned out to be the wisest and funniest group of people, according to Pogue. And according to PEW and Quantcast this might be true since the demographic of Twitter is different from that of for instance Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.
The seminar display turned into a social media experiment. David Pogue thought up a list of 40 questions, statement or other prompts that he posed to his 500,000 followers and compiled the best reactions in his book The World According to Twitter, out in August of this year.
What can you expect ? Some of the funniest photo captions and parental advice that you cannot help but feel ring true. And if you think it’s all good fun, imagine what Pogue went through to contact his followers who’s comments he wanted to publish. The ones that had changed their username, the ones that had quit twitter and the ones that were on honeymoon…
Fri 10 Apr 2009
The BBC has a wonderful article on the joys of oral histories and a project called StoryCorps, which collects them.
Wed 25 Feb 2009
There are many wonderful literary initiatives out there in the world. This time I would like to draw your attention to Fifty-Two Stories, an outlet created by Harper Perennial to give established and new talent a chance to spread their wings and short stories. Fifty-Two Stories will publish a story every week for one year.