★ Merlin Mann on creativity

Merlin Mann will be well known to the Mac-using read­ers of this blog. For those who don’t recog­nise his name, Merlin has long been asso­ci­ated with pro­ductiv­ity and cre­ativ­ity. I’ve just fin­ished watch­ing his Macworld 2009 talk. He exam­ines the dicho­tomy between being cre­at­ive and want­ing to be.
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★ Don’t f*ck with the Pack

Scott Pack, pub­lisher with The Friday Project (HarperCollins), has a blog on which he provides bet­ting tips, reviews, and snip­pets of news relat­ing to the pub­lish­ing industry. His reviews are often detailed. Sometimes they are short. One of his short reviews was read by the author and storm of tea-cup sized pro­por­tions has broken out.

Oh dear. I seem to have upset someone with one of my reviews.

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How old are certain words?

Researchers at Reading University have built a model of how word use has changed over the last forty thou­sand years. Mark Pagel, the bio­lo­gist behind the model, says:

When we speak to each other we’re play­ing this massive game of Chinese whispers.

The BBC report goes on:

What the research­ers found was that the fre­quency with which a word is used relates to how slowly it changes through time, so that the most com­mon words tend to be the old­est ones. For example, the words “I” and “who” are among the old­est, long with the words “two”, “three”, and “five”. The word “one” is only slightly younger.

Fascinating stuff. I have some reser­va­tions about the assump­tions made by the model, but it’s cer­tainly the case that words with the highest fre­quency are those most irreg­u­lar (i.e. are the least sub­ject­ive to reg­u­lar­ising forces). That’s why the verb ‘to be’ in English can get so crazy in its tenses, from ‘am’ to ‘was’. A word can only keep that kind of unique­ness if it’s being spoken often. Low fre­quency irreg­u­lars tend to die out.

Thanks to Katharine Fletcher for the heads-up.

► BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | ‘Oldest English words’ identified

BubbleCow: The Google Settlement

BubbleCow reports on the set­tle­ment agreed by Google to reim­burse the authors whose works Google has been scan­ning, fiendishly, in the dead of night.

Over the past years Google has been sys­tem­at­ic­ally scan­ning lib­rary books and mak­ing the digital cop­ies freely avail­able on the inter­net. The poten­tial implic­a­tions to writers, the impact on their sales and the thorny issues of copy­right res­ul­ted in legal action and a recent set­tle­ment in the US.

► BubbleCow: The Google Settlement — more money for writers?

★ New Strange Places: An Interview with Tom Saunders

Tom Saunders is that rare beast. He writes only short fic­tion. Rarer still, his short fic­tion is con­sist­ently excel­lent. His first antho­logy Brother, What Strange Place is This? (2004), received rave reviews upon pub­lic­a­tion, such as my own in Spike Magazine:

This fine col­lec­tion should prove thought-provoking and sad, musical and ener­vat­ing. A kal­eido­scope of lives, twis­ted but bright, and a worthy debut.

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★ Recording the Novel, Word by Fricking Word

It is my Web 2.0 dream to cre­ate a real-time rep­res­ent­a­tion of writ­ing a novel¹. I’d like a video, per­haps, that shows the let­ters appear­ing and dis­ap­pear­ing. The tap of a stone mason’s ham­mer could accom­pany each new let­ter; a squeaky sound a dele­tion. Once the novel is rep­res­en­ted in this way, the film could be speeded up. Imagine a novel tak­ing form like a house, brick by brick. Read more →

The War on Cliché

And it is a war. And we do cry “Havoc!”

Ian McEwan, it turns out, has a tri­um­vir­ate of friends whom he entrusts with his nov­els before any­one else, with the poet Craig Raine scold­ing him whenever his writ­ing becomes too for­mu­laic (the pair will mark FLF, “flick­er­ing log fire”, in the mar­gins of each other’s work whenever it falls into cliche). McEwan won’t even let his friend and fel­low nov­el­ist Martin Amis near his books before com­ple­tion, pre­fer­ring to trust it to Raine, Oxford his­tor­ian Timothy Garton Ash and philo­sopher Galen Strawson.

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★ In Defence of Readers

Mandy Brown writes a thought­ful post on read­ing in the digital age.

The web is still a noisy, crowded place—but it’s also lim­it­less, and surely we can find space enough for reading—a space where the text speaks to the reader and the reader does not strain to hear.

The topic of online read­ing skills sur­faces reg­u­larly among my uni­ver­sity col­leagues. Are the kids get­ting worse? Read more →

Mobile Web 2009

Jakob Nielsen, the Danish web usab­il­ity guru, has been look­ing at the state of the web for mobile devices. He com­pares it to the desktop web of 1998¹.

For the best user per­form­ance, you should design dif­fer­ent web­sites for each mobile device class — the smal­ler the screen, the fewer fea­tures, and the more scaled back your design.

This is a great point. You’ll see, if you request a page from my site on your iPhone or iPod Touch, that the page will be rendered in an iPhone-friendly format. I’m using the WordPress dona­tion­ware plug-in WPTouch.

► Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998 (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Behind The Mic

You’ve prob­ably gathered that I’m a fan of the audiobook. And, like most geeks, I’m equally inter­ested in the pro­cess of cre­at­ing them. (I’ve released my own book as a pod­cast, so I guess I should know a bit about the mind-numbing tedium of repeat­ing the same sen­tence ten times.)
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