A Novel Blog, Literally!

A novel blog is a novel written using a blog. For the most part, these are simple, unimaginative copy and paste jobs that do little to exploit the blogform's content management powers. Ferus Rex is an exception, and a truly original blog. I have never seen anything quite like it. The author has adapted a novel he wrote (but never published) more than 10 years ago, long before anyone had ever heard of a Weblog. He has adapted the novel to the blogform, and created something that is more than a novel, more than a blog, that offers an innovative way for readers to engage the text. Though the novel offers a traditional narrative structure, there is more than one way to get from A to B. It reminds me of Janet Murray's seminal work on multi-forma narrative: "Hamlet on the Holodeck". I think she would be happy to discover Jack Mardack's "Ferus Rex".

I am bringing Ferus Rex to the blog-form as an experiment. I am curious how the blog-form might be used as a vehicle for novel-length works of fiction. The blog-form allows for many exciting things with text. But the blog also brings with it a number of eccentricities and challenges. One such that I can think of immediately is the fact that I shall have to begin at the end of the book, rather than at the beginning. This is necessary so that readers be able to start at the “front”, where one usually finds the most recent, or “last” post. If I started my blog posts at the beginning of the book, the novel would be backwards. Weird, huh. Well, let’s see how this goes… more

novel blog

All your Celebs are belong to us

CELEB SITE STATS

On a popular webmaster BBS today, I posted a poll. I asked my friends and colleagues to guess how many celebrity related queries The Search Engine gets per day. Of course, that's a really tough number to arrive at. But a guess is a guess, so my guess is 40 million.

Well, that's the demand side, then. Now imagine that all that demand is inacessible to you because...

No, better yet, imagine that the US has been struck by an epidemic and...

"You are the President. You have to decide where you are going to draw the quarantine line. You have to decide who gets treated as a patient, and lives, and who gets a body-bag.

The situation with celebrity sites is exactly the same. This is a territory now filled with links to some of the most offensive domains on record, the spammers, the installers, etc. from back in the day.

So, not only is it an innately blurry territory, contentwise, but it also appears to be the in hands of proven betrayers of the public trust.

Hmmm. What would you do? Would you try to save the big circle, and carve-out just the little circle?

The Search Engine is, in this case, the President. He has no desire to give up the Southwest to the disease. But he must stop the spread. He only has so many resources available to divide between the dual efforts of containment and medical treatment. If you try to save the big circle, you may risk more of the country, because you know there will be a meaningful number of carriers who may travel outside the quarantine zone. It looks like the best solution might be to sacrifice the bigger circle and be sure to save the rest of the country. It doesn't hurt, either, to know that in just a few weeks the National Guard will be able to roll-in (with proper equipment, of course) and begin reclaiming National Assets.

Of course, it will take a little while for the infected to die. We may also expect that those within the quarantine zone will do all they can, for as long as they can, to survive. But these will be relegated to ever-smaller, very-well-contained slums in some of the bigger cities... more