Tech Lunch

It is often said that given enough time and a couple of typewriters a room full of monkeys would eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. What about a group of penguins? Or more precisely, 1,500-odd Penguin books readers?

Penguin books have been working, in collaboration with De Montfort University in Leicester, on a Million Penguins, a collective, novel-writing project using a wiki. Over 1,500 people have contributed and editing on the book closed on Wednesday.

This is another example the way in which the Internet can be used to harness the power of the crowd to produce collective works. I think it’s interesting as an example of the idea moving into a new domain: novel writing, although I’m not sure how readable it is. I have to confess I didn’t get too far as there are well over fifty characters to keep track of.

The idea, though, of being able to see a list of the characters each with a wiki page of information may well catch on back in the real world of book publishing. How about an online version of a paper book with this kind of additional – dare we say meta – information?

Unkind people have been known to make jokes about a Scotsman and his wallet, but what about his email in-box? According to spam activist group, Scotch Spam, Gordon Dick, a marketing specialist from Edinburgh, has successfully sued an email marketing company for sending him unsolicited spam. In a story that was first picked up by Associated Press, Mr Dick won £1,368.66 (plus interest) in the Edinburgh Sheriff Court. To achieve this, Mr Dick made use of the UK’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003.

I think this interesting because, according to Scotch Spam, if all the thousands of recipients of the same spam message had also sued, then the total bill would be more than £54 million. Despite many technical innovations spam still remains a huge problem for the Internet – perhaps resorting to the law, and the power of the crowd, is the answer.

Reuters announced to the Guardian last week that they are making another foray into the world of Web 2.0 with the setting up of a financial version of MySpace. This follows on the heels of last year’s creation of a Reuter’s news office inside the Second Life virtual world with a staff journalist sending virtual shorthand directly from the ‘new frontier’.

What do these announcements tell us about the direction of the business use of Web 2.0-style technology? I think this is interesting because either Reuters is a particularly unique and far-seeing company, happy to embrace the next big thing well before anyone else, or we are about to see a rash of ‘sensible’ and ‘grown up’ uses of what’s to date been mainly seen as a thing the kids are into. Watch this space.

Reuters are spending shareholders’ money, so they are obviously taking it seriously. They are currently in the process of increasing their Second Life team and I like their recent job advert for the Reuters Second Life news centre which begins: “Do you live inside Second Life?” and continues “we are looking for solid Second Life citizens – people whose avatars are at least six months old”. Interestingly, they “strongly prefer candidates based in the New York City area, as that is where the rest of our Second Life team is located.”