We went to an old friend’s wedding out in western New York, Niagara Falls to be exact. We hadn’t seen the bride, Mary Maloney, in, geez, ten years? So I thought, I should add her as a Facebook friend. Our friendship pre-dated the social networking madness phase, but like some hidden ancient city in […]

In the most recent step toward the conversational agent takeover (a conversonator apocalypse), the new video game Bot Colony by Montreal-based North Side is nearing completion. The game’s website promises “Unrestricted conversation in English between players and characters.” WRT took some time out from rearing our own chatbots for some unrestricted conversation with Bot Colony chief designer, Eugene Joseph.

I Love You, Beth Cooper was described to me as a John Hughes film as a book. It has the nerdy protagonist. The unreachable cheerleader (slated to be played by the quintessential cheerleader, Hayden Panettiere). The wacky friend and loads of comic violence thanks to Larry Doyle, writer for The Simpsons (and […]

New River Journal of Digital Writing and Art has just published a stand-alone version of “Marginalia in the Library of Babel.” [See the original WRT description and the “Live” version.] At the same time, the James Joyce Quarterly is preparing to publish my examination of annotation systems for Ulysses. These two events have […]

[This post offers context for a work-in-progress entitled “Marginalia in the Library of Babel.” alpha release.]

Let us write stories in the margins of the Web:

The web is becoming ours to write with. Whether supplying, ranking, or reviewing its contents or reordering the web with our folksonomic tagclouds, we are becoming the owners of more than just our Craig’s list and Ebay possessions. We are orchestrating this web and making of it what we will. Jeremy and Matt Kirschenbaum have reported on the moments when the tagclouds become art (see inset image made via TagCrowd.com). And now the web pages themselves have become our surfaces, our building blocks. Here’s