Last night, I finished Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Interesting read, but waaaaay too long (I have started reading his blog though). You can tell it has the academic slant to it. What passes as a “full review” here on {head}:sub/head is up over at LibraryThing.
Category Archives: Book Talk
The Ever Evolving LibraryThing
I’ll say it again… if you’re not on LibraryThing you are REALLY missing out. The only downside is that the updates and new features are rolling out so quickly that I can’t keep up. Every few weeks I feel like I’m learning a new service.
They have a new home page (think Facebook, but for books) which is all about your ‘profile’ and not so much your library. But it’s totally customizable, so it is only what you want.
Plus, they’ve gone beyond just the groups and have allowed users to ‘friend’ other users and get updates to their recent book aquisitions and profile changes.
I’ll stop there as I move on to try and figure out the whole “local bookstore has it in-stock” feature. Which, I imagine, will be another post.
Let me know of any LT features or highlights that might make this small bibliophile’s life a little better!
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Ghost (Writer) in the machine
Philip Parker is the most prolific author in history, according to Amazon. The NY Times ran this article about Philip Parker and his amazing technicolor technical writing machines. Apparently, Parker unleashes his computers on the Internet, which look in every nook and cranny to glean all stats, numbers, data, etc. Then Parker peppers in a few introductions and transition pieces, hits another button to format, create charts and an index and…. bam! You have a collection of 200,000 “published” books (actually they’re sitting in a POD database waiting until someone buys one).
Most are dry niche-technical stuff. The kind of specialist info you might expect from a data miner like the one he is running. But he says that he’s looking to produce works in one area-of fiction… the romance novel.
“I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”
Wow. Writing so formulaic that someone thinks a computer could do it? It will be interesting to see if it ever happens.
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Ghost (Writer) in the machine
The NY Times ran an article about Philip Parker and his amazing technicolor technical writing computer program. Basically, his machine collects every factoid, statistic and number from the web, Parker then peppers a few introductions and transitional phrases in there, hits another button to format and index… and bam! You have a collection of 200,000 separate books “authored” by one man.
No doubt, the texts are dry and boring. But I bet some neat trends start to appear in what his program finds online. It’s a pretty interesting way to collect data and organize it for a book. Though I imagine, if you ever want anything beyond tables and graphs, you’ll always need that human element.
Of course, there is romance fiction which Parker said he has already targeted with new algorithms…
“I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”
So we’ll have to wait and see if it ever goes any further!
