Hackpacker

There's been an odd devolution on the web from procrastination to poisonous. For some the Trumps and trolls are all too much so there's been lots of quitting Twitter, sending Facebook dark or adopting a kittens-only policy on Instagram. Artists and writers have to be selective in their intellectual diet so a few years ago I wrote an article called "The Distraction Engine: Digital Detox for Writers" looking at ways to moderate the harmful intake of web and social. Recently while talking about her book The Natural Way of Things at the National Library of Australia (full talk online) , Charlotte Wood talked about her decision to leave social:  So I was on Twitter for ages and I loved it... but I was completely addicted to it then and I was just never off it... when you’re writing a book you do need to be private, you know you need to be quiet or I need to be quiet. So I went off Twitter for nine months when I was writing this book. Wood recently returned t

There's been a lot of death knells sounded for the bookshop. And a few of the big chains have been in strife - Borders, Angus and Robertson were the big news. But an interesting rumination on the future of bookshops from the Association of University Presses got me thinking about how they could thrive. Rather than being defensive about online bookshops stealing business, the article suggests stealing clicks and mortar's ideas like showrooming. Bookshops are becoming the place where buyers encounter books but sneak home to buy them cheaply (or increasingly do it in store on their phones). Last Christmas in the US Amazon paid shoppers to report prices on their mobiles by promising discounts or cash then undercut physical bookstores on. There's no avoiding clicks and mortar in the physical world. So the article suggests bookshops are evolving into a "book place" offering book rental, secondhand options or membership models. It might even be possible to get a qu

When your work colleague asks you “Report QUESTION MARK” you’ve got a case of verbal texting on your hands. It’s that socially awkward mode of speech that texting and emails has left us with , where people believe they can no longer communicate tone and need to spell out their punctuation. We are so sick of these guys EXCLAMATION POINT. At its worst it can degenerate into emoticons – “You’re giving me FROWNY FACE right now and I need TONGUE POKING.” – and initialism - “Don’t make me LOL” – in conversation. Some try to specify font in conversation – “This joke is much funnier in Comic Sans” – but at its worst it becomes twitter speak. There’s nothing worse than talking to someone using hashtags in dialogue #justsayin. And it has to stop before people start trying to insert hyperlinks into speech FULL STOP. In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. Off Verbal Texters appeared in Issue No. 374. 

If you want to look into the future of books and publishing, the record industry makes for a pretty good crystal ball. The iPod took music out of the physical into the digital in the same way e-books will take books off the page. The documentary I Need That Record looks at how music stores in the States have been gutted by the changes in music, not only by MP3 downloads but also by 'big box chains'. These stores stock the big records (the doco says 1 in 5 albums sold in the US goes through a Walmart checkout) at lower prices because of their huge volumes. If you followed the recent parallel importation debate then you'll see similarities big bookstores and big box chains. Does it follow that independent bookstore will be pushed out by the evil machinations of the big stores and the unstoppable march of e-books? For me the answer is: not so much. Independent bookstores remain a sensual and social experience that will be tough to replace. Going to a bookstore is as m

National Novel Writing Month is the brain child of Chris Baty, a San Franciscan who took November off to write a book and found a few friends to join him. It 's become a global phenomenon with more than 150,000 participants. Chris chatted about the future of writing, the Office of Light and Letters , book piracy and the bright future for the story in the age of laptops and Kindle. Hackpacker: What made you start NaNoWriMo? Was it a tool to beat your own procrastination? Chris Baty: The "why" of it all is such a good question. It wasn't because I had a novel in me that I was dying to write. I'd always loved novels and worshipped novelists but had never really thought I would write a book of my own. Until I started planning the first NaNoWriMo, I believed that novelists were a (superior) alien race that had been beamed down to Earth to delight and intimidate the rest of the planet. Then, in 1999, I quit my full-time job and try to make a living as a freelance wri

Rarely outside of Bond films will you get to see evil geniuses aiming for world domination , but this week ABC supremo, Mark Scott has been accused of just that in his new strategy for the national broadcaster. At the Media 140 conference (perhaps while Austen Powers was dangling over a vat of genetically mutated tiger sharks) he revealed his evil plans. And what was the dark genius at the bottom of his schemes? Widgets and soft diplomacy. I was expecting at least a laser pointed at the UN, so freeing up the ABC's content with open feeds was a let down. A lot of ABC content is already available through RSS feeds (and videos like the one used above) so the real news is, as Margaret Simons pointed out , that content will be free to anyone including commercial users like, say, News Limited. Although as it's your ABC it could be argued that you've already paid for it. Still this is at odds with the Murdoch's talk of locking his content up behind a paywall and stopping the

November will see the release of Peter Carey's latest, Olivier and Parrot in America . I was lucky enough to snag an advance of this thumping tome and it's an impressive work. One of the things I like about Carey is that he is very much an Australian abroad so his writing looks at being stretched between two cultures. In his latest Europeans head into the belly of America just as that nation was the hope for democracy. But don't take my word for it. Here's what the man himself has to say: Interview with Peter Carey from Granta magazine on Vimeo . Today another Australian writer kicks off a new project. Under the dubious title of Marieke Hardy in Your Hand , The Age has launched a venture into m-fiction, or stories delivered by text. While it may be a first for Australia, cell fiction is already popular in Japan where keitai shosetsu (cell phone novels) have pulled in millions of dollars from subscriptions of less than two bucks a novel. Fairfax are relying on disco

I wrote this piece for the Victorian Writer magazine last year as an introduction to web 2.0 for creative writers. Some of it has dated (to update it yourself: swap all Facebook references for Twitter, ignore all MySpace and yawn loudly at mentions of UGC, plus John Birmingham's new book has inspired a slew of new fanfic ) but a student asked where they could find it so I thought it deserved a second life (whatever happened to Second Life?). NB. There'd be a few more additions to the top 5 (whittled down to top 4 with the disappearance of Sarsparilla) now - you'd be mad not to include Literary Minded or Max Barry's Machine Man plus a million others - but this was way back in the ancient history of last year... Around the turn of the millennium the web looked in trouble. The information superhighway of the 1990s seemed to have led nowhere and content was largely re-hashed from print media and ‘brochureware’ and advertising cluttered the web. Into this great

Way back in 2002 Jessa Crispin began Bookslut while living in Austin as a way of chatting with far-flung friends about books. She had more friends than she thought and now Bookslut is one of the most influential literary blogs. She's an upcoming guest at the Melbourne Writers' Festival so I wanted to know about her workshop and I ended up finding out that there is space for longer form content on the web, why it's better to graze the field than be a Trojan Horse and advice on how avoid stabbing your boss. Hackpacker: Bookslut has been insanely successful scoring more than 1500 unique hits a day just six months after it started in 2002 (and even more today) plus it recently won a Weblog Award in 2008. What’s made it so successful? Jessa Crispin: I really wish I knew how to answer this question, because I get it alot. I have no idea. We never did any marketing, and I never do anything that you're supposed to do to create a successful blog: I don't have comments open

Running underneath the recent film State of Play there's a struggle between old and new media. It's represented by grizzled newspaper hack, Cal McAffrey (Rusty Crowe), and up-and-coming blogger, Della Frye (Rachel McAdams). The two spar with their different approaches to a meaty political story (with a few nods to All The President's Men ) as McAffrey wisecracks about 'bloggers and bloodsuckers' rushing inaccurate stories to the web, while his editor (a suitably cranky Helen Mirren) points out that bloggers are cheap and file copy hourly. It's a grim insight into the changing world of media and one that's being played out daily if not hourly. A recent post, sorry, story in The Australian takes aim at Australian political bloggers for not breaking stories but 'obsess[ing] about the mainstream media and their reporting'. There's a waggling of a finger at 'group-think' which creates self-involved communities where there is 'not only no

It was television that shutdown Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. Jumpcutting between a mean-faced senator and a falsely accused US serviceman, the See It Now TV program brought the power of a new media against McCarthy. Flashforward to our own election with jumpcuts between perspectives as Kevin Rudd interrupts the TV ad in which Howard brands him a unionist. Howard quickly YouTubes back with “Grow Up Mr Rudd”, hitting the remote and pausing KRudd so he can give him a stern talking-to. Both ads use the web to switch off the old media of TV. But can netizens engage with Australian politics? Kevin07 gives a good impression of interaction. An estimated 25,000 Kmails and texts were sent out when the election was called, urging “Ruddrats” to enrol to vote. In political product placement, Kevin07 posts photos of T-shirted supporters in front of Uluru or the Taj Mahal, plus there’s a blog, petition and Facebook page. Rudd’s MySpace page features a snappy m