Was just scanning my RSS feeds and bumped into a headline at Reuters:Technology. “Publisher launches its first “wiki” novel”. Fun, true, but is it newsworthy enough? I didn’t even search for it, but I just can’t imagine that this hasn’t been done before.

Quote:
LONDON (Reuters Life!) – Fancy trying your hand at creative writing but can’t quite find the time? Tired of scribbling away all by yourself?

British publisher Penguin may have the answer — a Web-based, collaborative novel that can be written, edited or read by anyone, anywhere thanks to “wiki” software, the technology behind Web encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

The novel, “A Million Penguins,” went live on Thursday and its first lines are already being written, edited and rewritten by enthusiasts on www.amillionpenguins.com.

Penguin, which embarked on the project with a group of creative writing and new media students, says it is using the novel as a test of whether a group of disparate and diverse people can create a “believable fictional voice.”

“This is an experiment. It may end up like reading a bowl of alphabet spaghetti,” Jeremy Ettinghausen, head of digital publishing at Penguin UK said, adding there were no plans as yet to publish the completed work.

“We are not making any predictions. It would be utterly fantastic if we could at the end create a print remix.”

In 2005 we had a world premiere at our Texelse Boys Playground at the Lowlands festival. The world’s very first sms-novel “Low”(read the article at 3voor12, Dutch only sorry). All 55.000 festival visitors were able to participate in writing a novel together at the festival by sending text messages, responding to a previous text post shown on the large screens at the festival. To make sure that it didn’t end up in a bowl ofalphabet spaghetti, we had 4 Dutch writers moderate the story. The first writer did a kick off for a story, a second, third and fourth continued it so we had a good foundation. This story was the point of departure for people to respond to. With a continuously updated summary people could keep track of the storyline so we could secure it from becoming spaghetti. The four writers made sure that all text messages fitted seamlessly into the story. Result: a great unusual story written by a collective and four known writers. A simple principle (based on writing a story in a classroom where everyone can add a line), in combination with a large curtural event, technology, experiment and quality writers.

Anyway, we felt that the project should have had more recognition. But we didn’t have Penguin. We tried a publisher, but “back then” it was more difficult. And yes, of course www.amillionpenguins.com is fun. And thank god they have Penguin. But maybe it would be even better if they could just inport it into something like Blurb, that would fit the medium better.