In this post I check back in with the NaNoWriMo website to see what's changed over the years; and how much social web technology it's now using.

According to Wikipedia the NaNoWriMo project was started by Chris Baty in July 1999, with 21 participants in the San Francisco Bay area. The website was launched in 2000 and participants at that time communicated with each other via a Yahoo! group. In 2000, 140 participants attempted NaNoWriMo and 21 wrote 50,000 words. The site continued to grow and in 2007, a record 101,767 people registered - a bit over 15,000 of those managed to complete their 50k novel by the deadline. According to the NaNoWriMo twitter account, the current tally for 2008 is 118,583 authors, with 4,343 'winners' so far.

What's more, the site has raised $272,768 - NaNoWriMo is run by Office of Letters and Light, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity. It's very open on where the money goes.

As well as the much-used forums, there is NaNoWriMo activity happening in many places across the Web. You can read the NaNoWriMo blog, install a Firefox add-on to display your progress, upload a pic to the Flickr group, tweet your progress, skim the Mahalo page, listen to WrimoRadio (the official podcast), and much more. However, it's fair to say that most of the discussions are still happening in the official forums. As of today there are 19,354 threads and 307,760 posts in there. So things haven't changed too much.

From the NaNoWriMo "Write-In Event"; InfoCommons@West; November 19, 2008; pic by UF InfoCommons

Other Pic: Sashala

Let us know if any RWW readers participated in NaNoWriMo this year - perhaps you're busy frantically putting the finishing touches to your novel right now! I know how you feel :-)

In theory, the system might work, but LiveBook may rely too heavily on its points scheme. Points aren't just used to add lines to the story, but are also a sort of creative currency within the application. It takes 5 points to add a new sentence, for example, starting a new chapter costs 20, and every time you vote for a sentence it costs you a point. Earning points is, according to the FAQ, a matter of inviting new users.

Presumably, having a sentence selected for inclusion also earns you points, but what this adds up to is a book that heavily relies on the popularity of the app to succeed. Since new users only start with 10 points (enough to add a couple of sentences or dole out a few votes before going bust), the app has to be popular or run the risk of having very few users with enough points to contribute -- which would suddenly make the crowd a lot smaller. Right now, the Facebook version of LiveBook has 45 active daily users.

Other Innovative Ways to Write Online

We've looked at a number of innovative new collaborative writing applications on ReadWriteWeb over the past year. Here's a brief overview:

Recently, Sarah Perez reviewed the very slick Protagonize, on which users can work together to create choose-your-own-adventure style stories, as well as more traditional linear collaborative fiction. Last June, we looked at six "fiction 2.0" applications. Collaborative writing apps Novlet, Portrayl, and Ficlets, are still going strong, but Unblokt, has since shut down, which is too bad because it had produced some suprisingly readable fiction (note, you can actually still read the completed stories by navigating to this link).

We also looked at the National Novel Writing Month, in which people attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in a single month. For the 2007 edition this past November, there were a whopping 1,187,931,929 words written, and of the 101,000 participants, over 15,000 managed to crank out a full 50k word novel. For the even more insane writer, there's the 3 Day Novel contest during which people compete for cash prizes by writing a novel in 3 days. They actually publish the winners, some of which have won awards.

On more than one occasion we've mentioned the One Million Penguins Project. A collaboration between De Montfort University and Penguin Publishing in the UK, the idea was to see if a novel could be written by the crowd via a wiki. The result? According to one organizer it was "unlike anything I’ve read before." The novel has been broke up into sections, which you can read online. The banana version may be the oddest.

Clearly, there are a lot of new and interesting ways to write fiction online, and participating in any one of which can be a lot of fun. What's your favorite?