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This is my blog. It's old. Interests: live music, simulations and modeling, languages, iPod, social and business networking, systems thinking, history of science, management, BBQ, trivia, good coffee, organizational learning, traveling, personal histories.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

The Blog Novel

I can't be the first person to think of this.

Consider "The Blog Novel". Use of the blog medium to tell a narrative in real-time. Think Fox's "24" plus interactive fiction plus the web-community fuel of "Blair Witch". You can even weave real-time real-life events into the novel. The main character (or characters, each with a 1st person point-of-view?) reacts and writes based on actual events, with links to real news and events.

Think of the potential. Readers become authors as they follow and comment on the postings. Think a new level of the digital Soap Opera. Think of links to fabricated and real sites to enhance the story. Perhaps it's not even clear that it's fiction. The anonymity and apocryphal nature of the web would allow such blurring of fact & fiction.

The term "interactive fiction" comes to mind. I think the term got popular with Infocom's series of games in the early Apple-II days (Zork series, mysteries, and other text-based games with complex puzzles and narratives). There was also a notable attempt by Electronic Arts called "Majestic" that users "played" through the use of real-life real-time interactions through their emails, cell-phones, and fax machines. The players interacted (mostly through the Web) to solve mini-puzzles. The storyline was incredible self-referencing. You signed up with this "game" but something happens and the game gets "bugged" by a mystery entity because it has the potential of exposing a real-life conspiracy. To make things even stranger, the storyline had 9/11 elements -- before 9/11. They officially "closed" the game after 9/11 and officially declared they would stop since it was becoming "too real".

Any comments? Any takers?
|| hcpark, 2:18 PM

1 Comments:

Interesting idea! It brought to mind the Kaycee Nicole hoax from a number of years ago.
Anonymous Anonymous, at 9:09 AM  

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