On The Creative Penn, writer Joanna Penn blogs that she used Scrivener for her latest book, and that it was “a truly life-changing experience”. She lists a number of the benefits and useful features it has, such as the ability to drag and drop scenes into order, consolidate research notes into one handy place, and—what Penn calls a “game-changer”—seamlessly export e-books into Kindle and ePub files.

You can now create your own ebooks by compiling and exporting from Scrivener which is under $50, which once paid you can use over and over again. You obviously need to check your created files carefully but for plain text novels with little complications, this is a no-brainer.

Penn still recommends using professional formatters for books with complicated formatting or lots of images—but for ordinary prose novels, this takes a lot of the bother out of creating self-publishable works, and is also great for providing copies to beta readers.

That’s certainly less expensive than a professional publishing app, and if it doesn’t necessarily provide you with the same fineness of control over everything that those apps do, fiddling with fine detail may not matter to people who just want something that will look all right on a screen. (Of course, I don’t know how much fine detail control it allows, not having used it myself, but Penn seems happy enough with it.)

I think I’m really going to have to look into trying that thing out one of these days.

It has been a couple of weeks since I received my TruConnect MiFi for Christmas, and I’ve used it enough to get a decent idea of how well it works. I use the MiFi mostly with my iPod Touch and iPad, though I have had the chance to try it with my laptop as well.

Fundamentally, the device works at a speed of 320 kilobits down, 100 kilobits up. Even if it weren’t for the per-megabyte bandwidth charges, this is not something you would want to use to watch YouTube movies, and streaming Netflix is right out of the question. (I tried streaming Pandora as an experiment, and it played half a song and then started having to buffer every few seconds.)

Indeed, anything more than simple web browsing and text chat seems remarkably slow. If you get one of these and use it for web browsing, you will probably want to use a browser such as Opera that supports a low-bandwidth “turbo” mode. (Of course, it’s all relative. Back in the ‘90s, to anyone stuck with a dial-up modem, 320/100 kilobits would have been heavenly speed.)

Signing up with the TruConnect service was relatively simple—or it should have been, save that there was some sort of problem creating my account the first time, and I had to send in a ticket and wait a couple of days for them to reset the account so I could use it.

The service uses Sprint’s 3G mobile network, and charges $4.99 per month of use, plus 3.9 cents per megabyte of usage. The monthly charge only applies for months in which the device is used—though since I’m going to be using it pretty much every day, I can’t imagine I’ll ever go a month without being charged. It is a pre-paid service: they charge you $10 at a time to fill your account, then you use from that balance and they top up your account whenever your balance dwindles to $5. (They did accidentally charge me twice for my first top-up, but they noticed and corrected the issue themselves.)

My main use of the MiFi thus far has been for checking e-mail, loading RSS feeds into Reeder, and checking or updating Facebook and Twitter. It tends to take a while to get any results—I have to give it a minute or so for Facebook or Reeder to start to update. But as slow as it runs, I expect that’s fairly normal. The MiFi also lets me check in on Yelp, Facebook, or Foursquare, even from places that don’t have wifi of their own. I just need to be able to detect some other wireless network, and the iPod Touch or iPad’s geolocation service looks up its SSID to find out where I am.

When using it with my laptop, I can plug in the included USB cable to the device and use it as a USB 3G modem. This also lets it charge the battery, but turns wifi off so I can’t use it with my other gadgets. (I gather there may be a way to patch it so I can still use it with wifi at the same time, but I haven’t looked into that yet.) The first time it is connected to a computer, it will install a NovaTel USB connection utility off of internal storage, which allows the laptop to connect and monitors bandwidth usage.

While I have not actually used the device to download an e-book yet, I have little doubt I could do so easily with IOS 5’s integration of Safari with other apps for download purposes. Most e-books are small enough that they ought to download right away.

As far as battery life goes, it promises 4 hours of use or 40 of standby. I think that might be a little optimistic, but most of the time I’m able to get at least a couple of hours of continuous use out of it before it starts warning me of low battery power. For just checking on my breaks at work, or occasionally while I’m out and about, I can use it all day without problems. I do charge it overnight, every night.

There are a few things about the MiFi that I don’t like quite as much, however. For example, I’m not entirely sure why, but frequently when I’m using it with my iPod Touch or iPad I have to turn it off twice, because a second after the first time I turn it off, it comes right back on again. (I’m guessing this has something to do with the way the iOS devices maintain a wifi connection for a while even after I put them to sleep—perhaps the MiFi senses they’re trying to send something, and comes right back on again.) Sometimes it won’t turn off the second time, and I actually have to pop the battery out to get it to shut down. It also gets a little warm during use—not hot enough to burn, but certainly hot enough I can feel it in my pocket.

One other thing that’s slightly annoying is that the device came with a label on the bottom listing the default SSID and password (both of which I’ve since changed), just in case you have to reset the device to factory settings. However, within just a couple of days of carrying it in my pocket, that information had rubbed entirely off! Fortunately the device came with that information copied down on an insert card as well, and I copied it into my Evernote so I won’t lose it,

At any rate, I’m pretty happy with the device so far. The service can seem frustratingly slow at times, but then so can any 3G service. And when I consider that this lets me have iPhone-like mobile web access from my iPod Touch without having to pay an iPhone monthly contract fee, it’s worth every penny.

Meanwhile, cloud webclipper and memo pad Evernote has released a couple more mobile apps of its own. I mentioned Evernote’s new reading-format cleaner Clearly a few weeks ago, but now the company has come out with a couple of more specialized services. Evernote Food is a specialized app meant for documenting food experiences, with restaurant information, reviews, recipes, photos.

Evernote Hello “aims to modernize the standard greeting ritual.” (It’s nothing if not ambitious.) The idea is that you swap phones with the new people you meet so they can put their information on your phone and vice versa. It then stores that information linked to a picture of the person’s face so that a simple tap will call up details about who he is and where and when you’ve met. (I have to admit, this is the sort of thing that would come in handy for me given how hard a time I have remembering people’s faces. In fact I attempted to use Evernote itself that way for a while before giving up.)

According to Evernote’s founder and CEO Phil Libin, Evernote now has 20 million users, about twice what it had a year ago. and there are about 9,000 partner apps that use Evernote’s API in some way. That’s a lot of people using the cloud to keep track of their important information. The company has been profitable on its freemium model in the past, but a recent spate of expansion and hiring has caused it to dip back into the red.

The cloud is changing the way we keep track of a lot of written media—e-books, certainly, but also notebooks and even photo albums. Who knows what new innovation someone will come up with next?

The device will sync with a smartphone app so that you can decide what services you want to print out, then print paper copies of to-do lists, social network notifications, news stories, and so on. It’s the first element of a household appliance cloud system from its manufacturer, Berg, and should soon integrate with other home electronics.

It’s kind of the opposite of the “paperless office”—indeed, it seems to hark back to the days when strips of paper bearing stock symbols emerged from under little glass domes—but it might very well catch on with people who would like to have the tactile experience of interacting with their electronic lives on paper.

More recently, Google announced it will shut Wave down entirely in April 2012. Wired’s Webmonkey column reports that Apache’s efforts with Wave are now available in the form of “Wave in a Box”, a standalone client/server application that replicates the Wave experience.

Wave in a Box consists of two parts, a standalone wave server and a web client. The Wave in a Box web client looks a bit different than Google’s Wave user interface, but the same features are present. The Wave in a Box tools also have the distinct advantage of decentralization. Developers can run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware without Google being involved in any way.

This will be a great resource for those who liked Wave and want to keep using it after Google closes it down, or who dislike Google having access to their collaborative information. Of course, there are plenty of other collaborative editing tools out there as well.

At the moment there is no structure in place that allows review copies to be delivered directly to the reviewer as an eBook. Publishers rightly furrow their brow over DRM and how files can be passed around too easily, but was this not always the case? NetGalley provide a service that is most likely to give us what we want, but it is still unchartered territory in this country. And emailing files directly to reviewers’ Kindles is now done more frequently, as it was for this year’s Booker Prize judges, but the spectre of DRM still lurks.

Though Harvie doesn’t mention this, a lot of publishers have been trying e-review copies, but in such a way as to turn off the very reviewers they should be courting. Witness John Scalzi’s annoyed reaction to the hoops publishers expected him to jump through to read e-ARCs.

As I see it, there are a couple of easy options publishers have for sending review copies electronically. One such option would be to forego the DRM and send the e-copy unencrypted. I’m pretty sure Baen does this already, but the idea gives most publishers heartburn. But I would be inclined to ask: if you trust this person enough to want him to review your book, why are you treating him like a possible criminal who will scatter it to the digital winds?

But that being said, I think another option should be pretty obvious: send the reviewer a gift certificate code to let him “buy” the book himself from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or whatever other e-book store the publisher wants to use. (This is how Jenna Moran made a review copy of Nobilis 3rd Edition available to me for my review of it here.) The publisher would probably have to cut some sort of special deal with the store to make the e-book available “early” to such would-be reviewers, but it handily avoids the DRM hoop-jumping problem—the reviewer need jump through no more hoops than he would if he bought the thing for himself.

And the way that Amazon is partnering with Overdrive and libraries suggests another alternative: instead of “buying” the e-book, reviewers could be allowed to “check it out” from a very private section of Amazon’s e-library. The book evaporates after the review period is over, and isn’t left cluttering up the reviewer’s own e-book library.

The problem of getting an e-book from the publisher to the consumer has already been solved. Getting an e-book from the publisher to an early reviewer should really just take a minor adjustment to that process.

According to these more in-depth pieces in Wired Cloudline and TechWorld (found via Slashdot), Silk begins at the same place as previous split-client browsers such as Opera Turbo but then goes further, with a few inherent advantages that are part and parcel of Amazon’s cloud efforts.

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the network of computers and storage that Amazon uses to provide all its cloud-based services, both to end users and to the thousands of websites it hosts for businesses (including, for example, Netflix, as Jeff Bezos pointed out during his presentation). And that is where Silk is going to do its pre-processing. And it should be pretty darned fast, per TechWorld:

EC2 has, "for all practical purposes, unlimited computational power and unlimited bandwidth," Bezos said.

The articles go into additional technical detail too involved for me to summarize, having to do with use of constant compression, and ditching HTTP in favor of SPDY, and so on, but suffice it to say: there are significant improvements in speed here. I wonder if, as Wired suspects, Amazon might be aiming at a desktop version of Silk somewhere down the road? What might that be like?

One other advantage Amazon gains from Silk is that Kindle Fire tablets (and any other devices that get to use Silk in the future) will have lightning-fast access to any website or other Internet resource that already lives in EC2—after all, it’s already right there; Amazon doesn’t have to step outside its own cloud to fetch it. (I wonder if businesses will, at some point, begin to openly advertise they run on the Amazon cloud for fastest compatibility with Fire tablets? Depending on how fast the Silk browser takes off, it could happen.)

Of course, this is not without its privacy downside. The Wired piece links to this one on IntoMobile, warning that using Silk’s split-client mode will give Amazon access to potentially huge amounts of information about your browsing habits, as well as your Amazon buying, e-book checking out, video viewing, etc. habits.

Because you’re logged into your Fire at all times, Amazon not only knows where you go on the web, but what you’ve purchased from Amazon itself. They can combine that data and do several things, one option being to use your web history to predict what items you’re interesting in purchasing. They’d be foolish not to use all the product reviews you’ve been reading for a camera you’re thinking of buying to offer you a special deal on your next DSLR the next time you load up Amazon’s homepage.

Or, further, it could use that information to go into advertising itself, being able to target you ever better and better due to the things it’s been learning about you.

Of course, some would find this more of a problem than others. Frankly, I’d rather like to be offered discounts on something I’m thinking about buying. But I know others would have differing opinions about that.

To note, the Silk browser can be used in a standard, all-in-the-tablet browser configuration. (Though for people who distrust Amazon in the cloud, I can’t see why they’d be more likely to trust it wouldn’t sneak peeks at their data through the tablet, too.)

Needless to say, when something new and original comes along, the rest of the world immediately tries to copy and improve upon it. So now PaidContent has a comparison chart of Flipboard and eight other news aggregation apps: Pulse, Zite, SkyGrid, Editions, and more. Some of these apps, such as Flipboard, trawl social networks for sources; others use more official news sources and content partners. Some simply present the most popular stories; others try to guess based on user preferences what users are likely to want to see.

It’s still relatively early in the aggregator app market, of course, so it remains to be seen which if these will have the staying power necessary to stick around. Consumers can only use so many aggregators at once, after all.

Once done, the resulting book can be opened in iBooks or sent to Dropbox, and from there you can e-mail it to friends, kids (it’s a great way to make a children’s book) or submit it to the iBooks Store, safe in the knowledge that it meets all of Apple’s technical requirements.

At $7, the program will not break the bank of any would-be e-book makers. That being said, I’m still not sure how useful such a program would really be or who would want to use it. The tools available on computers are much more powerful, and given that most books would surely be written on a computer the text would be there already.

Still, I’m sure it will have its uses for at least some people, and will undoubtedly be worth the $7 purchase price for them.

Last year I wrote about retrofitting 3G to wifi-enabled devices (such as e-readers) by use of a mobile hotspot such as a MiFi. Now Rick Broida’s latest “The Cheapskate” column on CNet points out what might be the best deal yet for such a device: $96 for the MiFi plus shipping, then $4.99 per month plus 3.9 cents per megabyte for service. The fee is charged only for months during which you actually use the device—if you leave it in a closet all summer, you don’t pay a thing.

The benefit of a 3G-enabled Kindle or Nook is that you can download e-books anywhere, but the drawback is that you really can’t do much else with that 3G. If you have a tablet that can surf the web, you could pay $100+ more for a 3G-enabled version, but if you want to tether your laptop to it you’re going to end up paying even more.

Now, this isn’t the mobile wifi you want to use if you’re going to download huge files, or stream movies. But e-books are teeny-tiny, and so is the bandwidth you would use from surfing the web or checking e-mail.

TruConnect Mobile’s MiFi deal tempts me in ways I have not been tempted by a MiFi device before. For the people who just hate being out of touch but can wait ‘til they get home to download huge files, it could be the best mobile wi-fi deal ever.

It might look more than a little like what Reed Hastings is doing to Netflix.

Last night, Hastings caused no small amount of consternation when he announced that he is spinning off the disc-by-mail rental business into a separate company, Qwikster (and adding game-disc-by-mail rentals to it), completely severing its relation to the streaming portion of the business that remains under the Netflix name. This means that not only are customers paying two different prices for mail rental and streaming, they’re going to be paying them to different companies that are not linked to each other.

Engadget’s Darren Murph points out:

Of course, everyone’s seemingly focused on how much of an annoyance this is for customers in the here and now, and I can’t readily disagree. Having two separate movie queues, two separate charges and two separate rating libraries sounds like a heck of a lot more work. But that’s exactly the point. Take a closer look at what Reed is aiming for here: if he’s "moving quickly," there’s at least a sliver of a chance that Netflix is proactively separating itself from a dying business (DVD-by-mail), while leaving the namesake on a business that has huge growth potential (global streaming). It also gives Netflix proper the ability to focus solely on hammering out better content deals for customers, pushing for earlier access to new releases and perhaps even landing deals that would’ve been impossible with the DVD business still along for the ride.

Murph notes that the disc-rental-by-mail business could continue to be profitable for quite some time, but it’s clearly not where the future is heading. By burning the boats this soon, Hastings is forging ahead into a very young market while most of his competitors are still clinging to the same old thing—just as he did by launching disc rental by mail in the first place. (And look how well that worked out.)

It’s not a perfect parallel, of course. Printed books don’t require expensive equipment to read but e-books do, while DVDs and streaming movies both require an up-front investment (though less so for the physical DVDs now, as inexpensive as both DVD players and old analog TVs have gotten). Still, it’s interesting to contrast Reed Hastings’s consistent looks forward with the publishing industry’s attempts to hold onto the dead-tree-pulp past.

APNIC, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, is the registry that issues Internet addresses for the booming Asia-Pacific region, and is expected to be the first to run out. Registries in other regions may last just a few months longer.

The article’s writers describe the new address system, IPv6, and its 340 billion billion billion addresses, as the system that will save the Internet from the end of capacity.  It recommends that companies start developing their IPv6 systems before it’s too late to add to IPv4.  It does, however, caution that the IPv6 system will be incompatible with the IPv4 system, creating–what else?–two IP systems running concurrently, and forcing businesses and consumers to straddle the worlds of both IP systems, new and old, at least for a good while.  You thought the Browser wars were a pain.

Actually, browser users probably won’t have to worry: Most ISPs are either planning on rolling out IPv6, or have already experimented with it.  ISP customers may see no difference whatsoever with their web access.  But if you produce a web site, you might want to see what your ISP or IT staff is doing about IPv6, and whether you’ll need to take any steps on your site to accommodate it.

And how does this affect ebooks, you ask?  Well, since every item that connects to the Internet needs its own IP address–including your ebook reading device or cellphone–the switch to the IPv6 system is supposed to allow for unprecedented communications between your many devices and the Internet, including some connections you may not have thought of… but clearly somebody did.

In Japan, for instance, some of the taxis have IPv6 addresses in their windscreen wipers. When taxies turn on their wipers, the cab company knows and can send lots of cabs to the area because it’s raining. “There are so many opportunities for other sorts of business and what you can do in terms of communication,” says (executive director of the Internet Society of Australia, Holly) Raiche.

The suggestion here is that ebook reading devices and cellphones, for example, may be able to contact a book outlet when it knows you’ve finished a book, or looked up an author or phrase, in order to sell you a new book.  Doesn’t sound too bad.  But it also suggests that device might be able to contact the outlet (or… bum bum bummm… someone else) if you copy that ebook and give it to someone else, or post it online.  Hey, at least that would solve the DRM problem…

Of course, these same organizations are talking about using those 340 billion billion billion IP addresses and giving them to every item on a store shelf, every electronic device in your home (even light bulbs and cables), every public piece of infrastructure, adding them to every device on your desk (“Attention: You are out of staples.  I have ordered a box for you.”), etc, etc.  If they do that, how long before we need an IPv8 system and another few billion billion billion billion billion billion addresses?

Bottom line, we should expect ground-breaking changes in our electronic devices… at some point.  Maybe soon.  Maybe not.  Bookmark this spot.

TechCrunch has an interesting post by guest author Shervin Pishevar, founder of the OpenMesh Project, in which he talks about that project’s genesis and goals. Pishevar talks about discussing information freedom with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in January of 2010, then taking part in passing along information from Egypt in January 2011.

I was staying up for days sharing and tweeting information as they happened. I had two close personal friends of mine in Egypt who were passing me information when they could. The day Egypt blocked the internet and mobile networks my mind went back to what I had said to Secretary Clinton. The only line of defense against government filtering and blocking their citizens from freely communicating and coordinating via communication networks was to create a new line of communications technologies that governments would find hard to block: Ad hoc wireless mesh networks. I called the idea OpenMesh and tweeted it.

Shortly, he was in touch with volunteers who were willing to turn the idea into a reality, and a company that was willing to kick in the designs for a tiny mobile router that could be hidden in a pocket and manufactured at a cost of $90 per unit.

The idea is to create mesh networks between people with computers or other wifi-connected devices and others with these pocket-sized routers, so the information can hop along until it can find someone near enough an uplink to the outside world to get the information through.

Open Mesh networking is a type of networking wherein each connected node in the network may act as an independent router or “smart” device, regardless of whether it has an Internet connection or not. Mesh networks are incredibly robust, with continuous connections that can reconfigure around broken or blocked paths by “hopping” from node to node until the destination is reached, such as another device on the network or connecting to an Internet back haul. When there is local Internet available, they can amplify the number of people who can connect to it. When there isn’t, mesh networks can allow people to communicate with each other in the event that other forms of electronic communication are broken down. Devices consist of most wifi enabled computers and run on existing Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, and Linux systems along with iPhone and Android mobile devices. An open source mesh network further offers a scalable solution that retains low costs while avoiding path dependencies and vendor lock-in. Combined with open hardware, these networks facilitate long-term maintenance flexibility and improvements.

If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because this is the same type of networking technology that the OLPC XO-1 was equipped with, to network together the students equipped with them and provide network access to all even if only a few were near the uplink to the outside world. And as the OpenMesh Project demonstrates, the idea has potential outside the field of only education. I wish them the best of luck.

Of course, this is just the beginning. As the technology improves—and getting it into widespread use will drive improvement—we could be on the way to the sort of everything-is-networked future depicted in Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End. Won’t that be an interesting world to live in? Hopefully once such widespread information to access becomes available, it will be harder for tyrants to keep their people down. (Of course, they’ll probably still find ways anyway, but we can dream, right?)

Of course, the idea of finding a good book via a website is not new. Alexandria Digital Literature (which I’ve covered a few times here) was one of the very first book-recommendation websites, and is actually still around, if a little old and creaky. I’ve found it tends to dispense some incredibly accurate recommendations, even if it takes a while to do so.

On this Quora thread (free registration necessary to view), a number of readers have chimed in with other recommendations for book recommendation sites: Goodreads.com, LibraryThing.com, Anobii.com, BookArmy.com, TheCopia.com, Shelfari.com, and others. What’s your favorite?

Jeanne
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(Welcome, BoingBoing readers! Thank you for coming.)

Our main mission here at TeleRead is cover the ways that electronic media have changed reading. But occasionally we also talk about how it changes writing, because after all, writing is just the flip side of reading. And there are a number of sites where writing is only half the equation, because after someone has written something electronically, then naturally other people are going to need to read it electronically.

One such site, which I have discussed here before, was Ficlets.com, begun in early 2007 as a subsidiary of AOL. Ficlets was based on a simple idea: let people write stories 1024 bytes at a time, with other people free to spin their own stories out of those others have created. The stories, called “ficlets”, were released under a Creative Commons Attribution/Sharealike license, meaning that other people could reuse them however they wanted as long as the reusers did not impose further restrictions.

Requiem for Ficlets

I first learned about Ficlets when two well-known Internet personalities became involved with it and endorsed it—child-actor-turned-geek Wil Wheaton and geek-turned-SF-writer John Scalzi. (In fact, I think that’s also how I first heard of John Scalzi, too—his involvement in Ficlets. I heard about it from Wheaton; he heard about it from Scalzi. Or maybe I just saw Scalzi’s post on BoingBoing.) I went there and had fun.

Both Scalzi and Wheaton eventually burned out on it—not surprising, I guess, as busy as they are with other projects—but I and a number of other writers continued participating. Even after Kevin Lawver, the site’s creator, left AOL, and AOL never replaced him, the site continued chugging along, rolling up a remarkable 49,000 story segment contributions before AOL finally pulled the plug. (My blog post here ended up being reblogged by Wil Wheaton himself, I was astonished to notice.)

But fortunately, the Creative Commons license came to the rescue. Since all the content of the site was licensed under Attribution/Sharealike, Lawver was able to rescue and archive all of the stories. (Lawver said on his blog that though he’d always thought Creative Commons was a good idea, he hadn’t ever imagined that he would be one of the beneficiaries.) Though he couldn’t get the login information, which could have been used to let people “claim” their ficlets on the new site, he could at least make all 49,000 of those ficlets available for people to read.

Enter Ficly

And he was also able to create a revised, improved version of the site, called Ficly.com, to continue the idea of Ficlets from where it had left off, even making a couple of improvements along the way. It took a while to get the site up and running (during which time someone else tried to float his own successor site called “litlets.com”; not sure what happened to it but the domain name no longer resolves and the last post to its Twitter account was in February 2009). Once it was, a number of the old writers returned, and continued or created new stories from where they left off. Including me, for a while. The first story was posted on May 16, 2009, and in the intervening 19 months just over 22,600 ficlets have been created at the new site.

I gradually found other things to do with my time (such as writing more frequently for TeleRead) and hadn’t been back to the site for several months when my fancy took me to visit and write some more there a few days ago. And looking it over, I was a little saddened to see that activity had fallen off considerably. In fact, it looks like only a couple of dozen people at most are still writing with any regularity—there are only about a dozen or so posts per day, and the average story segment only gets read by about 5 to 15 people.

I suppose that without big-name Internet bloggers bringing it attention, it just became too obscure for people to discover easily. It has gotten the occasional mention in writing blogs (such as this one collecting five micro-fiction sites for fast writing inspiration, or this one from a writer reposting one of his works), but it doesn’t seem to be widely known anymore. And that’s a pity.

The Writing Experience

Writing for Ficlets or Ficly was always a bit challenging. For the most part, it’s a fun challenge: how much can you say in 1024 bytes? Do you keep descriptions sparse so you can show more events, or do you build a 1024-byte word picture in which nothing much actually happens? What if you alternate between the two? What if you tell a story entirely in dialogue so that only the words come across, like in an old-time radio show? And should you try to come out to 1024 bytes exactly, or intentionally go a little long and then go back to try to tighten things up?

One problem I ran into is that it can be hard to get people to write sequels. Most ficlets just don’t get a sequel—and often, if you write a sequel to someone else’s, they won’t follow you up in return. That’s how it was at the height of Ficly’s popularity, and it’s how it is even more now that there are relatively few active participants. People simply have different tastes, and stories that excite other people enough to provoke a follow-up can be rare.

Often, I ended up writing long chains of ficlets by myself, without any accompaniment. I always felt a little like I was “cheating”, doing that—or else kind of missing the point of the site. But I suppose that, in a way, it’s the same thing that Charles Dickens and other magazine serial writers of the 19th century always did—just on a much smaller scale. And certainly it’s more satisfying to write 1K of story at a time and get whatever feedback you get, than to work on writing the whole thing at once, never complete it, and so never hear from anybody.

Not a Tragedy of the Creative Commons

But even if people aren’t using the site that much anymore, it still stands as a great example of Creative Commons fulfilling its mission to promote creativity. The relatively non-restrictive license meant that the material from the old site was not lost when AOL shut it down, even though AOL didn’t provide its own methods of exporting content (they actually seriously suggested people should just copy and paste their stories into a Word document)—Lawver was able to scoop the site and reuse the content because it was CC-licensed.

I was also able to make use of some Ficlets content in my “Biblio File” podcast, reading aloud some of the segments that particularly amused me (overriding TalkShoe’s default non-commercial CC license due to Ficlets’s sharealike). I think those shows came out rather well. Maybe I should do more sometime.

And about five months ago, Ficleteers got together and selected a number of their favorite ficlets to publish in a 60-page book for $7.50 to serve as a fundraiser for the site. (Alas that I wasn’t reading the site at the time; it would have been nice to participate, and maybe get some of my own stories in there.)

And who knows what other uses we will find for this sort of bite-sized content in the future of the net? The 1-kilobyte size would actually be perfect for display on a tablet screen—it’s just about the right size for reading in a single screen at a legible font size. (Sadly, the individual-stories Twitter feed has been down since August 2009, so there isn’t really an easy way to get a Flipboard channel with just Ficly story content at the moment—just the Ficly blog’s feed.)

It really is a lot of fun writing a round-robin story, with neither writer exactly sure where the next one is going to take it. I’d really like to see more writers return to Ficlets and provide a broader pool of interest—the more writers there are, the more writers might want to sequel other writers’ stories.

My own Ficlets story archive can be found here, and my Ficly user page is here. I would like to invite any readers who think it looks like fun to go ahead and give it a shot. There’s no lengthy account creation process—you can use Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or other OpenID providers to sign in.