Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:59 pm on 3/31/2005
I’m pleased to be able to tell the world just exactly what it is I’ve been hacking on for all this time. By sometime this summer, we’ll open Fictionsuit to the world. “We” are myself and Ouroboros, a content editor at Everything2. I am a former heavy user of E2 with a background in literary hyperfiction, as well as an active reporter on games and their ongoing merge with social software. Fictionsuit is fundamentally about this latter kind of social play.
The intent of Fictionsuit is a function that was almost fulfilled by E2: that of collaborative fiction. We’ve been saying that it’s “like Wikipedia for things that don’t exist and haven’t been dreamt of yet.” To be more specific, Fictionsuit will support a kind of writing we might call “creative documentation”: the non-fiction-style of writing on fictional topics. This is what Jorge Luis Borges called “ficciones,” a word perhaps best coined in English as “fictives.”
Fictionsuit will be able to support many concurrent projects, and contributors are invited to be involved in as many of these projects as they find interesting. Fictionsuit contributors will generate ideas for the projects, some of them will be approved by the editors (“editors” is what we’re saying instead of “admins,” because Fictionsuit should be considered a publication as much as a platform). There will be a small number of public projects open at any given time, and the editors will likely create private projects for those interested. At first, we will focus on a single project at a time, and increase the number of simultaneous projects as the number of contributors increases.
Fictionsuit is for collaboration, which precludes both encyclopedia-izing an existing fiction and fleshing out your own personal world-building project. Fictionsuit is also not a place for posting short stories or fan fiction, as those are usually considered “complete” by their authors and hence don’t support collaborative play. (Fictionsuit projects will be licensed by default under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license; other licenses may be available on a per-project basis.)
Some of you may be familiar with the semi-competitive frameworks for fictive collaboration, Lexicon and Noteworthy. Fictionsuit will support those frameworks soon after launch and develop others as well, as we permute and pervert the wiki-like engine that we’ll start with.
As for the name, comics writer Grant Morrison coined it in The Invisibles to mean the identity you wear when you enter a story; computer gamers would call it an avatar. We thought it sounded much cooler than “fictive.com,” although that’s not bad either. But while alternate personae are not a big part of our initial vision for Fictionsuit, there’s something inherent in the fictive that doesn’t call to mind the starched-white-shirted neutral voice of Wikipedia, the more disheveled E2 or the million fractured faces of the authority-less web at large. We’re wise enough to know that our voice, our avatar, will be a bit more subversive. The devil wears gray flannel suits.
So get your game face on, people. We hope to have a closed beta version ready before the end of May; if you’d like to be considered for the beta, drop me a note at misuba@fictionsuit.com.
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 5:44 pm on 3/22/2005
I’ve taken up a new language, Ruby, for my programming efforts, along with a new web-app framework called Ruby on Rails. Why should you give a flying beaver crap? Here.
See, this whole programming thing was accidental for me. I expected to do this for a living while I really invested myself in something else. I wrote little programs in grade school and had a good time with it, always wished I had the power to make something that was really in the league of the software we bought in boxes, then kind of got absorbed into graphic design for a while. That led to HTML, then for some reason to JavaScript, and suddenly the urge was back. I wanted the power to make these web-application things. And now here I am, writing code in my free time.
I talked a bit about the whole power thing back when I eulogized HyperCard. Here’s what that’s about for me: when I undertake making something, it’s often pretty important to me that I can get the results out of it that I envision in my head when I start dreaming things up. Or to get in the ballpark, anyway. It’s probably a gifted-child thing. You know, you get used to being awesome at a certain set of things, and when you find that you aren’t, you get frustrated and quit almost immediately. That leads you to tend to stick with what you’re already good at, and if you’re not careful, you can find yourself eventually putting a lot of your time and energy – that is, your free time and energy – into something that, while fun, is maybe not as fun (or otherwise rewarding) as something else.
So, why Ruby and Ruby on Rails? Look at Rails’ front page. “With joy and less code.” (more…)
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 12:15 pm on 3/17/2005
Warning: this post is beyond buzzword compliant. We are doing COLD BUZZWORD FUSION here. So watch out. (And I’ve kept it approachable – so, the risk here is mere buzzword toxicity, not actual confusion. If you don’t mind that, read on.)
Buzzword #1 is social networking services. We’ve discussed them here before, but most recently in a spot where some of you likely missed it. To sum up, the current opinion is that social networking is the suck. Friendster and its nine million clones have failed to deliver on their promise to describe and augment human social connections, and they aren’t even that great at finding you people to hook up with.
Buzzword #2 is folksonomy – the currently-trendy notion that, rather than try and think up a taxonomy for how to arrange the world’s objects to cover your every user’s every need, you should just let your users make up labels for their own use and aggregate the results. Kind of a wisdom-of-crowds thing. Folksonomy is more commonly known as tagging, and it has replaced live chat as the most exciting and beautiful thing about Flickr. (There’s also this thing del.icio.us which combines tags with aggressive simplicity to become the first external bookmark server actually worth using. It’s still highly geeky, because it reflects its userbase so far, but it is indeed cool. Check it.)
So, put them together and what have you got? (more…)
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 12:39 am on 3/2/2005
Gibberish Radio keeps at it despite it all. I don’t have a proper “podcast” “feed” for it due to hosting issues, so I’ve got to post here… but I think all those requirements are rather silly anyway. And I’ve got some backup on that.
Just to add fiber to the post, here is some 100% pure uncut geek crack for you. You’re welcome.
link here