ReadWriteWeb

Writer and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi is the author of several young adult fantasy novels, including the popular series The Spiderwick Chronicles. Earlier this week, his latest book, The Search for WondLa hit bookshelves in U.S., and within it featured an interactive augmented reality experience readers could unlock using their Web browsers. The book, published by Simon & Schuster, is one of the first of its kind and could be a glimpse into how kids will enjoy reading in the future.

Best-selling crime author James Patterson will release a new kind of novel next month - one that's been collaboratively written with the crowd. Called AirBorne, the upcoming novel will feature 30 chapters, each written by a different author except the first and last - those will be written by Patterson himself. With the release of this book, it appears the Web 2.0 movement of collaborative writing is about to hit the mainstream.

5 years ago, before this blog was a media business, I participated in NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. It's an annual creative writing project, in which participants try to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I did it in November 2003 and documented it in ReadWriteWeb. While the resulting work of art was very average, and thankfully long ago purged from the RWW server, I had a lot of fun writing the book and discovered some new things about myself.

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.