3 days to go!
Yes - you heard right - we’ll be battening down the hatches on Wednesday, so get those last-minute edits in sooner rather than later. We’ve also closed most of the posts on this blog for comments (the spam was becoming unbearable) but we’ve left open the last few so that you can tell us how it is going and continue the really positive and interesting conversations you have all been having. We’ll post more on the blog over the next few days, but if you want to have a look at some of the things people have been saying about this project, here are a couple of useful links here, here and here…
jeremy@penguin
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March 4th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
Thanks Jeremy for this wonderful opportunity to be part of an excellent project. Cheers tom everyone, Paul
March 4th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
ps. hi again Jeremy. Just another thought. You mentioned about a spam problem. This can be solved by having a spam protection option activated. Before a person posts a comment, a series of random letters or numbers come up and the person must replicate those random numbers. This knocks out auto-spamming. This would allow comments to gto through with very few spams possible if at all. cheerio
March 5th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
A Million Penguins does not a coherent bird make?…
An interesting comment from Douglas Rushkoff about the A Million Penguins collaborative wiki writing project, quoted on NewsForge:
“A Million Penguins looks like fun, but it’s still likely to remain more a million penguins than a cohesive …
March 5th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Sir,
the deadline of the Novel is near and the end of my little contributions is too. I appreciated your initiative and thank you for this opportunity. As sea, so your language ‘receives water from everywhere, and gives it to all the rivers again’. This way people can freely express their thoughts. People hope their work produces good fruits as well as in our case. As above, so I like to greet quoting Alessandro Manzoni last time. So he wrote for the readers of his Novel: ‘Be fond of who wrote it, and also a bit for who arranged it. But if we had managed to bore you, believe none did it on purpose. THE END’.
Yours respectfully,
Neri.
March 6th, 2007 at 12:21 am
I concur, neri, cheers, Hi everyone,
Thanks for this excellent project. I have been enjoying it immensely. It has been a wonderful experience. Quite moving at times.
Can I ask what time the site is locking down on Wednesday, (UK time??)
Cheers,
Paul
March 6th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
ahem
Thanks Jeremy.
I wonder if there is a way to include the blogs in the final published format? They provide a fascinating insight into the creative challenges faced.
With the exception of the odd silly comment. Now really Wikidhairdo!
Although - come to think of it - a Wipi Novel, hmmmm
March 6th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Hi,
Thanks for this nice project. It has been very pleasant to particpiate in
it.
March 6th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Jon, Jeremy, and all the Penguin hosts of this project,
Thank you! You have provided the media, the software, the idea, and the wherewithal to allow us to participate in a historic experiment. The “novel” may not be a top 10 best seller, but to most of us who took part, it has been our favorite novel for the past 5 weeks.
Plus, speaking for myself, it has allowed me to develop the new habit of daily writing. My dream from the time I could read, was to be an author, and yet, it has always something kept on the back burner. This project has helped move it to the foreground, and it is to be hoped, that many of us will not just go back into the woodwork, but will use the motivation and skills we honed and practiced here to go on to new concepts and creative endeavors.
My best wishes to all that have rubbed shoulders, sparred, and laughed with me at our human foibles as we crafted something, with what we had to work, the clicking of a million penguin flippers on a million typewriters.
~ paul
March 7th, 2007 at 6:55 am
All the postings here are almost amazingly of the brown-nose variety.
Whereas any that have a critical edge seem to disappear…
Oh dear, is Penguin taking things this seriously?
March 7th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Shameless plug from the editorial team:
UK readers interested in this topic should attend Bob Stein’s talk on Reading and Writing in the Networked Era at DMU’s Institute of Creative Technologies, next Tuesday 13 March at 5pm. http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/wp/?p=32
Hope to see you there!
March 7th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Wikihairdo
I hope we have never taken things too seriously and we have not deleted any comments critical of the project - we have deleted comments when they have been unnecessarily harsh to other contributors…
jeremy@penguin
March 7th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Point taken.
And with that, I sign off to wish all involved the best of luck with their careers.
Goodnight, sweet literary princes!
March 7th, 2007 at 11:54 am