First off, I’d like to thank Dr. Simons for the mention in her blog, The Literary Mind, and in what, as I understand it, is a very prestigious journal in its field. I also wanted to make a quick point about the nature of collaborative writing that may not come to mind for those who aren’t involved (whether as an author or editor) in creative writing on a daily basis.

I completely agree that writing a collaborative novel, as per Penguin’s experiment a couple of years ago with A Million Penguins, is at best a challenging endeavour and is more often than not doomed to failure without the proper moderation and curation.

On Protagonize, however, the majority of the writers who comprise our membership aren’t trying to write novels, per se — they’re exercising their writing skills and honing their craft, trying to build up experience and learn from other members on the site. Not to mention having a little fun in the process (I hope.) The goal of Protagonize (and many other collaborative writing sites online) is not necessarily to promote the creation of collaborative novels, but to promote the act of collaboration itself. The short-term goals, from my perspective, are primarily self-improvement and practicing, with other more distant or lofty goals such as getting published in some form or other, or building up a portfolio of work to use as reference material.

Private or limited (invite-only) groups will allow for the creation of larger works of fiction in a more controlled environment, and those features are nearing on the horizon (I’m working on them as we speak.) Much of the intention behind the full-fledged groups feature is to allow individual and small groups of authors to collaborate on (and promote) larger, more developed works of fiction and have more control over the nature of their collaboration (if any.)

I’d really love to hear what our authors have to say about it. While there’s no shortage of entertainment and good fiction available on Protagonize, I’ve never thought of it, as it stands now, as primarily a novel-writing endeavour.

As you may have seen last week, Protagonize is a finalist for the SXSW Web Awards. To add to that, the voting is now open for the SXSW People’s Choice Award. Please stop in as often as you’d like (you can vote once a day) and vote for us!

Here’s how it works

The People’s Choice Award is the online public’s favorite finalist from the SXSW Web Awards competition. The People’s Choice Winner will be unveiled at the Web Awards Ceremony on March 15, along with all the category winners and Best of Show.

You can vote for Protagonize once daily — the deadline for voting is midnight (CST) on Friday, March 6th.

The People’s Choice Award: http://sxsw.com/peoples-choice

We’ll be at SXSW this year in Austin, TX — the awards show is great exposure for the site. So if you want to support Protagonize, please hop on over to the site above and vote for us every day — thanks! :)

We’d like to congratulate HomelessNation and all of the other winners for a job well done, though, as well as Pixton, the other competitor in our category. Maybe we’ll give it another go next year. :)

In an interesting reversal of fortune, however, I received word from Applied Arts Magazine this morning that Protagonize was a winner in two different categories of their 2008 Applied Arts Interactive Awards: Experimental/Artistic and Weblog/Social Networking. Applied Arts is a very prestigious Canadian-based visual and communication arts magazine, so this definitely takes the edge off of last night’s loss in the CNMAs! The interactive awards will be featured in the March 2009 issue of the magazine, and we’ll also be featured on their web site. Awesome!

For a little background, the Applied Arts awards are judged by highly regarded industry professionals and experts from across North America. The entries are judged based on creative merit, technical execution and suitability for intended end use. The special, beautifully designed Interactive Awards issue, published in March 2009, is read by more than 65,000 industry professionals. The Interactive Awards Winners Gallery of the Applied Arts web site also attracts more than 200,000 unique visitors annually.

New features this week

First off, you may have noticed that writing circles is not live yet. This is mainly because I’ve added and revamped a few other things around the site since last week, such as:

• Overhauling the commenting system (new comment types, better comment paging and loading; some of this is still in progress)
• Author guidance
• Revamped site footer (oooh, shiny!… and more useful)
• A smattering of bug fixes and performance enhancements

Protagonize in the press

Now, you may have not have seen this if you’re not a Vancouverite, but the Georgia Straight, a weekly Vancouver newspaper, published a great article about Protagonize today:

Web community spins Protagonize’s yarns
http://www.straight.com/article-152025/web-community-spins-protagonizes-yarns

The article was dead on the money, though it did cover the groups feature, something that I had discussed with the author a month or so ago when we last spoke, and I was planning to have live on the site by today. I apologize for the delay, but I think the enhancements to the site in the last little bit are a good enough reason to justify the few days delay. I anticipate the groups feature will be ready at some point next week; it’s going well, but it’s just taking a little longer than I had estimated it would (isn’t that always the case with estimates…)

We also had some sidebar coverage yesterday in another local daily paper, 24hrs, which you can check out (transcribed) here:

24hrs Blogosphere Buzz: 07.02.08
http://www.cyberbuzz.com/2008/07/02/24hrs-blogosphere-buzz-070208/

The official writing circles preview

Anyhow, I thought I’d tide you all over with a teaser, and give you a good overview of some of the features writing circles will offer.

First off, the obvious question many of you have posed is “what exactly are writing circles? The quick summary would be:

Writing circles are fundamentally micro-communities, a concept similar how “groups” features function on other community sites and social networks that you may be familiar with, but where group moderators have a bit more control. The group moderator has full control over the type of writing that goes on inside their group and can invite Protagonize members, or other users by email address, host writing competitions, moderate discussions, run contests (and eventually polls) within their circles. Sponsored (commercial) groups will also be featured around the site, similar to our featured author or Editor’s Pick on the main Stories and Authors pages, and will have a few extra features. Sponsored groups will not be available immediately but will follow shortly after the main writing circles release.

Here are a few salient points that should help explain how it all works. I’ll just refer to writing circles as “groups” in shorthand fashion here. :)

• Anyone can create and moderate a group
• Groups can have multiple moderators
• Moderators can edit all posts (optionally — this will be a switch when creating a new group) within their groups; this should really help groups that are made up of a couple of authors who are all moderators and want to collaborate on larger projects together
• Moderators can remove stories from the group at their own discretion (note: this doesn’t delete the story, it only removes it from the group)
• Groups can be public or private (at the discretion of the moderator)
• Groups can be open (allowing people to join themselves), open with authorization (people can apply to join, and the moderator can accept or decline their application), or closed (only people invited by the moderator can join)
• Groups are entirely free to create for individuals, community groups, or non-profit organizations, but not if you’re creating a group for a for-profit entity (i.e. a business of one form or another)
• Sponsored groups can be created for businesses or individuals who want to sponsor specific types of activities, and will offer some branding opportunities
• Sponsored groups will have a few options that regular groups don’t have, but that won’t limit the functionality of regular groups
• Groups can have restrictions on content — some examples of this would be: whether or not they allow mature content; whether they allow members to invite other users or not; whether or not the profanity filter is enforced by default or not; if they have a maximum number of posts per user over a certain time span (e.g. only 1 post a day, etc.); or if they allow non-group members to write follow-up segments of stories that are in the group (this may take some tweaking to get right)
• Groups can contain discussions (yes, full discussion threads!)
• Users will be able to join multiple groups (though there may be a Facebook-style maximum number of groups you can belong to, to keep things within reason)
• As it stands, a story can only belong to one group at a time (due to issues with trying to enforce rules between different groups, since a story can have multiple co-authors); however, you can always remove a story from one group and add it to another, assuming it falls within the ruleset for that group
• Group members will be able to subscribe to RSS feeds and notifications of new content in their groups
• Members may or may not (depending on the group’s settings) be able to invite friends to groups they belong to
• Each group will have its own homepage, complete with hot stories, top rated stories, popular authors, and many of the other statistics you see on our high-level stories and authors pages
• There will be some “system” groups that everyone can belong to, i.e. a central Protagonize group where users can provide feedback and suggestions, or just chat amongst themselves

Whew! And that’s not all of it. Still, I hope that gives you all a clearer understanding of how writing circles will work. My quick disclaimer: not all of this functionality may be implemented at the initial launch (for instance, the sponsorship option will probably come a bit later), but this is what I intend to have up and running in the next little bit. I also have a good list of other features I’d love to add to groups down the road, but some of those may be a while coming. :)

I’d love to hear feedback from our authors, too. If you have suggestions for things you’d like to see, or problems you foresee with the features I’ve described above, please comment here or on the help center and let me know!

Online collaboration lands young authors book deal

A friend of mine forwarded this article from today’s Globe and Mail my way, seeing as I have an interest in this arena. I’m glad he did, seeing as I don’t subscribe to the G&M and likely would have missed it.

The article itself is relevant to Protagonize in that it describes a book deal obtained by two young authors, Danielle Bennett, from Victoria, BC, and Jaida Jones, from New York. The interesting bit here is that Ms. Bennett and Ms. Jones met online (via a discussion on the comments of a blog, interestingly enough) and collaborated on their 400-page novel over the course of an 18-day email-based writing binge, alternating between work and writing. The time difference appears to have worked in their favour, too, though they appear to have more energy than I could ever hope to have…

Their novel, Havemercy, a fantasy/streampunk hybrid (or so it appears from what I’ve read about it), is set to be released in hardcover format this August. In case you’re curious, it’s being published by Spectra, the science-fiction arm of Random House’s Bantam Dell Publishing Group. If you’d like to pre-order a copy of the hardcover edition, you can check it out over at Amazon.

Drawing inspiration from unlikely sources

What I find particularly inspiring in this case is that these two young women are a perfect example of the type of atmosphere I’m trying to create here on Protagonize. So far, I think our authors here are doing a great job of accomplishing just that; I know at least a couple of you are working on a joint novel, and I hope it won’t be a unique occurrence. I’m just here to build the tools you think would help you with your writing in a collaborative setting, and to enjoy watching the community grow. The dynamics of writing within a community allow for immediate feedback, critique, sharing of ideas, and praise, which each and every author needs and requires in order to thrive.

Ideally, I’d like to reproduce a coffee-house like feel here on Protagonize, but the limitations of technology make that difficult to develop. However, the web allows us to expand on that concept in ways that you might not be able to find in that warm, enveloping environment. Hopefully, as Protagonize grows and our community finds its identity, we’ll be able to provide an overlapping, complementary environment that gives us the best of both worlds.

I’d love to hear your feedback about it, too.

It’s great to be recognized in such a prestigious competition. In the Social Media Websites category, Protagonize is up against with fellow BC-based community site Pixton, an online comic-strip generator, and Homeless Nation, a website for and by the homeless, based in Montreal. More information about the finalists can be found here.

The 14 Pixel Award winners will be announced at a gala at CiRCA in Toronto on November 18th, 2008.

Wish us luck! You can read the full contents of the press release over at the Taunt Media blog.

You can read more about it over at Technosailor:
http://technosailor.com/2008/06/06/technosailor-tv-alert-saturday-june-7-9pm-eastern/

The links referenced in the video are posted below for your convenience. Enjoy!

Here’s the external link to the roundup on Viddler if you have trouble loading it up here.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/protagonize/videos/1/

… and here are this week’s links:

Editor’s Pick: Angel Killer by redhat

Featured Author: somebodysomeday83

Press links:

Simple and Stunning (Part 2): 10 Website Designs that Inspire
http://bitsonewmedia.com/permalink/simple_and_stunning_part_2

Social Networks- Time to Specialize
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/social-networks-time-to-specialize/

So yeah, that’s that for this week. Let me know if this is an improvement over the old-style roundup posts. :)

Aside from my laptop being used and abused by every presenter after me (okay, maybe I’m blowing that a bit out of proportion, but it was pretty funny), I’m hoping Protagonize got some good exposure out of it and I did manage to speak to a variety of interesting folks with some great ideas for the site at the after-party at Steamworks. I also got to see a few locally-developed Facebook apps that were pretty slick — and actually make money (!!).

I thought I’d share the slides from my presentation last night (it’s a pretty short slide deck, as I only had about 15-20 minutes to present and demo the site.)

Here’s the direct link on Slideshare, too:
http://www.slideshare.net/nickbouton/protagonize-community-building-socialcamp-app-nite

Here’s the blurb about my talk, in case you’re curious:

Protagonize – A collaborative fiction writing community w/ Nick Bouton

Protagonize is a creative writing community dedicated to writing various forms of collaborative, interactive fiction. One author writes a story, and others post branches or chapters to it in different directions. The result is an organic, evolving story where everyone can participate.

Nick Bouton will discuss community building in niche markets, Facebook integration, and contrast Facebook’s walled garden approach with the development and nurturing of a stand-alone social network / community site.

I’ll be putting together some slides for my presentation tonight, and I’ll be live demoing the site during my talk. If any Protagonize authors happen to be around downtown Vancouver tomorrow after work, come down and let me know — I’d love to meet some of you guys in person!