Earlier, Borders Australia and Random House held a contest to find twenty-eight writers who would be able to write the bulk of the book. The chapters they produce will need to be less than 750 words so, obviously, this book will be a little lighter than Patterson's other novels.

Once complete, Airborne will be released electronically, one chapter at a time, starting on March 20th. Later, a print edition will be published, but only as a prize of sorts for the participants in the competition - it will not be mass produced.

Collaborative Writing is So Very Web 2.0

The roots of the collaborative writing movement can be found in many web startups, including those like Novlet, Potrayl, Ficlets, Unblokt, Protagonize, and others we profiled here. A popular activity for creative writers, these communities offer various takes on how a co-written story should be developed, some focused more on "choose your own adventure"-style stories while others focus more on linear narratives.

Although the James Patterson novel is more of a marketing campaign than anything else - and, in this case, the "crowd" is actually a hand-picked selection of aspiring writers - it's still interesting to see such a widely-read writer embracing the co-writing trend. While those passionate about the subject may say this particular effort doesn't qualify since it isn't truly written by "the crowd," it's events like this that take the general idea behind the trend and cross it over to where it can make a mark on the minds of the mainstream.

What remains to be seen at this point is whether a crowdsourced, co-written novel can actually be any good.

Those interested in following the progress of AirBorne can do so on Facebook, Twitter, and via RSS.

Like an increasing number of private companies, Blurb is starting to report its financial results publicly, almost as if it were a public company. This presumably serves the purpose of both reassuring customers that the business is healthy and attracting potential acquirers.

Allow us to quote shamelessly from Blurb's press release (at least it prevents errors):

"Blurb, the creative publishing platform, today reported a year of record growth in 2008 with revenues approaching $30 million. The company reached profitability and achieved nearly 200% year-over-year revenue growth in 2008."

Quiz: which would you prefer: a company with $200 million in advertising revenue that is burning cash, or a business with $30 million in subscription revenue that is profitable? The first describes Facebook, the second describes Blurb. Yes, it is almost absurd to make the comparison. But the point is that old business maxim: revenue is vanity, and profit is sanity.

What Does this Tell Us About the Economy?

On the face of it, not much. Blurb's business is partly seasonal; people buy more during the holiday season. We asked Eileen Gittins, the company's CEO. She sounded almost surprised, not at all triumphant, and generally cautious. Which is a reasonable reaction of anybody doing fairly well in today's economy. Eileen confirmed that January is also looking good: 30% over projections. So this is not just a holiday buying story; it's more about what specifically Blurb offers.

What Does this Tell Us About Blurb's Market?

Eileen attributed the good results to three factors:

1. Pent-up demand to write books. Who doesn't have a book they have always wanted to write? It is now easier than ever to publish (if not write) a book.
2. The cultural shift of people becoming more active contributors to media, as writers as well as readers.
3. The forced leisure that layoffs create, and the desire to do something that one has some control over and can point to as an achievement. This may be exacerbated by the bad times: get laid off from a big job, take three months to write a book about what you know, do it well and you'll be back in demand pretty soon.

There is one simpler explanation that we see. In tough times, affordable luxuries that provide a high level of emotional satisfaction do well: think movies, roses, and booze.

The next time you find your desire to write lacking, Plinky may be just the inspiration you need.

Shellen doesn't just know blogging, he's lived it. Now he's hoping to inspire others.

Where Does the Inspiration Come From?

Plinky is simple and straightforward. Every day, the service delivers writing prompts in hopes of eliciting short introspective answers. If Twitter is "What are you doing?", Plinky is "What do you think about this?"

Current prompts range from making a mixtape of favorite songs to defending your vice. Users compose responses within Plinky using text, images, maps, or other objects that help them craft an answer. Then, those answers can be easily repurposed to other microblogging and blogging services.

But Plinky also manages to provide a venue for social interaction of its own. Users have a stream of responses that are publicly viewable, they can follow other users, and they can favorite responses. Plinky also provides immediate access to other answers to the question you're considering - providing even more sources of inspriration. For a seemingly simple service, there is quite a bit going on.

Louis Gray got an early preview of the service. So if you're interested in more details on all Plinky has to offer, his thorough walkthrough of Plinky provides a solid overview.

In our testing, Plinky proved to be entertaining. The initial prompts are fun, inspiring good crosstalk among Plinky's early adopters. Reading others' responses proved equally compelling.

Whether that interest is sustainable remains to be seen. Facebook has found some of its success by prompting users with an endless barrage of surveys. There's no reason that Plinky can't do the same.

In the long-term, it will be interesting to see what types of users gravitate to the site and continue to return on a daily basis. In the short-term, however, one thing is for certain: with a known entity like Shellen involved, Plinky is sure to develop a rapid following.

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 :-)

Approximately 200 respondents told GooseGrade that while blogs aren't a major source of news for most of them, they often find errors on blogs and that makes them less likely to share the content they find there with other readers. While unsurprising, these numbers are a good illustration of just how much things have changed in media - or not.

The company asked a demographically diverse group of respondents on Amazon's Mechanical Turk website to fill out the survey and published the results today on the GooseGrade company blog. The bulk of respondents spent some time reading blogs but were people who remained dependent on "mainstream sources" for most of their news.

We thought that the most interesting findings were these:

• Spelling and grammatical errors harmed a reader's opinion of a blog, their willingness to spend time on the site and to share its content nearly as much as perceived factual errors did.


• Respondents believe that spelling, grammar and factual errors on blogs are common. Only 20% of respondents said that it was "not often" or "never" that they found such errors.

Good writing is a rare skill, though it often goes unnoticed when it produces easily read text. Bad writing is very, very common and if you're someone who finds it distracting - you're not alone. Many of us fluctuate somewhere in between, but this study is another reminder that it's not a casual matter if we wish to communicate effectively. If you're response is that this study is over exagerating it's conclusions - then your probly not paying attention. (Ha!)

Below are a few of the charts, you can see the rest on the GooseGrade blog. The lesson here? It seems pretty clear. We bloggers are harming our own credibility and traffic with our inattention to details, not just in the facts, but in the basics of our writing. Let's do better!

Well Spelled Charts

Enter Memiary, a startlingly simple diary service that prompts you to enter up to five sentence fragments about what you did today and lets you look back by date at what you did in the past. It's really simple, from the gracefully implemented account creation process to the AJAX item editing. I've bookmarked it and am going to try to fill it out daily for awhile; I'd sure like to be able to look back at any given day in my life and remember what happened. This is so simple I might actually use it.

Memiary is a weekend creation from Sid Yadav, long-time app reviewer at the blog Rev2.org. Yadav wrote a good post about the process of creating the service, how fulfilling it was and how proud his first user (mom) was of him.

These kinds of projects can go well, or not. We wrote about the relaunch of Diary.com last month, where private diaries are now combined with "lifestream" aggregation of activity from around the web. That site claims 11k diaries have been created, a number lower than what you'd think they could have managed with that URL and no effort at all.

Twitter's not made for this kind of thing, either. That company gives and takes away access to users' own archives as it suits their scaling needs and people tend to send more messages in a day than is appropriate as a personal history.

Even more simple could be the way to go. That's what I'd like, I realize now, after checking out Memiary. Hopefully Memiary's Yadav will implement a simple XML data-export option so I don't have to resent the control he holds over my life, trapped in his website. I'd also like to be able to enter more characters per line than is currently allowed. Simple is good but so are complete sentences. I would also like a reminder to make my entries - for me that would work well as an IM at 5:00 PM.

Little services like this might not turn the world upside down, they might not take markets by storm or get acquired for tens of millions of dollars - but they can make a difference in the lives of the people who use them. Isn't that really why most of us are here on the internet, anyway?

We asked 20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants to tell us how much they get paid, by the post, by the hour or by the month - however their rates are set. Half of them told us, on the condition that we wouldn't disclose who they were or where they worked.

There are a handful of people in tech blogging that make even more than this but the vast majority of people who get paid to blog get paid far less. To be honest we have no idea what it's like outside the Web 2.0 world. (Honestly, is it raining?) We hope that no one will be too angry with us if these numbers lead their employees to feel newly shortchanged and protest. These folks are at the top of their field.

Our methodology was to email people we trust to be honest and who trust us to keep their identities secret, and ask them to post anonymously their rates and the rates they can confirm of co-workers or employees they've overseen within the last year. We realized after performing the survey that we should have asked our respondents whether the current US economic downturn was impacting their rates but to be honest, it didn't occur to us to ask. Maybe that tells you something, too.

We were told pay rates for per-post blogging jobs, full-time blog and social media jobs and for hourly consulting.

Payment Per Blog Post

Most people who are paid to blog are paid per post. What kinds of rates are our respondents seeing? The low end of the scale was $10 per post for very short posts. Almost everyone else said they were paid $25 per post. One person said they were paid $80 per post! One respondent said they were paid $200 per item of long-form writing; bloggers often do other kinds of writing as well.

How does this work out long term? Based on our experience working for many different blogs, we believe that most per-post blogging gigs assume you'll write an average of 3 blog posts in 4 hours. It often takes longer than that to write 3 posts but ambitious bloggers, like the ones we surveyed, know that at this stage you put in extra unpaid hours just to get ahead.

Let's say these people are half-time pro-bloggers making $25 per post, writing 3 posts per day. That's $75 per half-day, a little less than $20 per hour, about $1500 to $1750 per month for half time work. Take two of those jobs at once, do it for a year, and you'll make about $40k. Everyone's got different arrangements, though, so it's hard to take these kinds of annual projections too seriously.

The world is full of people who would be insanely jealous of people who make $40k a year blogging, if it was widely known that you could do that for a living. The biggest rewards aren't the money, though, but the thrill of writing and the ability to dedicate time to the subject you love.

The truth is, very few people are able to get jobs like this. A small number of those who are so lucky take the next step, financially, and move into a full time position with a blog or go in-house doing social media work at a marketing agency or software company.

The Wages of the In-house/Full-Time Blogger

Career minded bloggers coming up through the ranks of the per-post writers sometimes land full time jobs writing, managing other part time bloggers and performing other social media activities like events planning, promotion, etc. Sometimes this work is done as an employee, sometimes as an extended "consulting" relationship. Some of them get work at blogs, others do similar work for marketing firms and software companies. The founders of the big tech blogs now spend most of their time running the businesses they started. These second-in-command type social media positions have a wide range of pay rates.

Our respondents reported annual pay rates ranging from $45k and $55k with benefits (!) up to $70k, $80k and $90k with bonuses. We're tempted to say, based on the anonymously submitted but descriptive replies we got, that the closer to pure journalism our respondents were doing the lower their wages were. That's not always the case, but social media management and working for marketing firms were clear indicators of higher end pay rates. That makes sense.

Based on our experience and conversations in the industry, we can say that all of the people doing this work full time are putting in at least 50 to 60 hour work weeks, often longer. That means most are making the equivalent of $20 to $35 dollars per hour. One factor not taken into consideration here is equity, the full time bloggers and in-house social media pros who are working for startups are hoping to get a nice payday in the unlikely event that their company is acquired.

There are certainly a handful of full time bloggers making six figures, as well. Robert Scoble famously noted that even after everything he did to humanize Microsoft, they never paid him $100k annually, so we presume he's making more than that at Fast Company. He's barely a blogger, but Walt Mossberg is rumored to be paid $1 million per year. It's safe to assume that some in the upper echelon of traditional media reporters now blogging for mainstream press are making more than anyone we surveyed as well.

Consulting - The Big Money

Social media consultants, expert practitioners with multiple years of success in the kinds of positions discussed above and in some cases in traditional marketing jobs, are the ones making the most money.

No one we surveyed named an hourly consulting rate below $150 per hour. $300 per hour was the most common rate named. Some listed monthly rates of $2k to $4k per engagement, which we assume probably means 20 to 40 hours per month.

Social media (or in many cases Search Engine Optimization) consulting is probably making a fair number of people six figures. What are these people doing? They are advising companies on how to set up and run blogs, how to reach out to and relate to bloggers, how to use Twitter (seriously) and how to make advanced use of RSS. The SEO work is probably the most technical, but degrees of technical challenge are all relative. A lot of this work is about communication skills.

It's a new world online and people with experience succeeding in it are widely sought-after by businesses wanting to catch up fast. There's a nearly bottomless need for and a strong demand for high-quality social media consulting - the big challenge is bridging the gap between living a Web 2.0 life and reaching out effectively to people.

We believe there are a fair number of snake-oil salespeople in the social media consulting field as well, but we didn't survey any of those people.

Conclusion - This Part of the Economy Has Been Strong, if Small, So Far

We don't want to claim that there are a lot of people making the kind of money discussed above for blogging or consulting. It's still a very small sector. Between advertising and venture capital, revenues in this sector can't be considered secure during a time of economic down turn.

There are far more people working in social media industries making less money than the people discussed above and the vast majority of participants don't make any money at all in this economy. Making money isn't really the point for most people, but there is an economy around social media and so some people are making money. We believe that this informal survey shows how much money some of the top people in the sector are making. Does this sound crazy to you? Compared to other professions does it seem like too little money? Far too much? Let us know what you think in comments below.

Illustration titled "Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot" by Flickr user Mike Licht

Authorship/Identity

Knol puts a lot of emphasis on authorship and, somewhat akin to Amazon's "Real Name" scheme, authors can validate their identity on Knol through either a credit card or phone number.

The default setting for every Knol is "moderated collaboration." In this mode, anybody with a Google account can suggest changes to an knol, but the author has to accept these changes before they go live.

Authors can also invite others to contribute to their articles and given them the same rights as the original author.

There is also an option for authors to write a short bio of themselves in Knol. While this is interesting here, it will be even more interesting to see if Google might start sharing these Knol identities (and maybe even the users' reputation) among more of its properties.

Usage

Setting up a Knol is as easy as clicking the "Write a Knol" button. The text editor, too, is pretty straightforward, especially in the face of the often cryptic mark-up language most wikis use.

Knol uses a rich text editor, which presents users with all the typical editing functions, including basic formatting options, links (all set to 'nonfollow'), and the ability to add references.

As of now, you can not embed any videos or other content, except for the New Yorker Cartoons that Google incensed for this project for reasons only Google knows.

Users who don't want to write their own articles can review and rate knols. There is also an option to leave comments on every knol.

Creative Commons

Users can choose between three licenses for their articles, the Creative Commons Attribution License, the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and an "All Rights Reserved" license. The Attribution license is the default setting. Users can chose a different license for every knol.

Advertising

Authors on Knol can enter their AdSense data into Knol. Besides the cut Google already takes from the advertising through AdSense anyway, authors will get the regular AdSense payout for every click on an ad. This seems like a smart way to reward users who write the best (or most popular) content, while still making money for Google.

In the competition with Wikipedia, this might mean that some authors could divert their attention from editing Wikipedia articles to Knol. However, the question will also be if spammers can find a way of abusing this.

New Yorker Cartoons?

While there is no option to embed any videos or other content into the site, authors can embed cartoons from the New Yorker. This is done through a rather cumbersome process where users have to first search for a cartoon in the New Yorker store and then enter the ID number of the cartoon into Knol. Why Google chose the New Yorker's cartoon archive for this is anybody's guess, but chances are that Google will announce more content partnerships in the near future.

Is Google Going After Wikipedia?

Given how often Wikipedia results appear as Google's top results, it would make sense for Google to look at this and decide to start its own competitor. By incentivizing authors through AdSense and by giving its users simple, but powerful tools to start their articles, Google might just be on the right track. While Google keeps reiterating that Knol is not meant to compete with Wikipedia, it's hard to see how that wouldn't be the case.

Knol, of course, has far fewer articles now than Wikipedia, but as it grows, it will be interesting to watch if Google is going to give preference to its own pages over the Wikipedia results. After all, Knol carries Google advertising and Wikipedia doesn't, so Google would clearly have an incentive in doing so, though the potential public outcry if Google would try to do this might prevent them from even attempting it.

Having read some of the stories on Quillpill my initial assessment may have been a bit harsh. While Pulitzer material they are not, many of these are not as bad as the images that the term "cell phone novel" evokes. Quillpill writers have so far found a way to embrace the 140 character constraint without resorting to emoticons and chat acronyms, even if punctuation and grammar in some of the stories leaves something to be desired.

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about a competition that challenged people to write an entire story in just 140 characters. "Being constrained to exactly 140 characters will spark your creative juices and force you to focus stringently on word choice, sentence structure, and even punctuation," said Copyblogger's Brian Clark in introducing the contest, and the results were quite awesome. Quillpill expands on the idea that constraints have the potential to lead to more creative and innovative output. While I still cringe at calling anything written in this manner a novel -- even if it is of novel length -- and I'd certainly not care to read a novel on my phone, I have changed my mind on the potential for the cell phone as a creative writing medium.

The winning entry entry comes from Ron Gould:

"Time travel works!" the note read. "However you can only travel to the past and one-way." I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill.

The spirit of the Twitter Writing Contest is reminiscent of Hemingway's famous six-word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." It's said that Hemingway called those six words his greatest story ever, and two year's ago WIRED magazine brought together a group of best-selling authors to compose their own 6 word masterpieces.

Remember to check out Copyblogger for the other winning stories, and see Daniel Smith's blog for a slideshow of all 331 entries.

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?

Registered users at Protagonize receive their own author profile page, can write new stories, branches and chapters, add page markers, keep track of their favorite authors, add comments, rate stories, send items to friends, view and print stories, and more.

To get started with your first story, you click the "Protagonize!" link from the right-hand menu. If you want to contribute a branch or chapter to someone else's story, you find a story that has an incomplete story fragment. There will be a form to post a new fragment, instead of the normal branch or chapter content. Fill out the form with your new piece, press "Publish" once you're satisfied with your contribution, and it will be saved.

Different Types of Stories

Earlier this month, Protagonize began offering a new feature: linear stories. Originally, all stories on this site were addventure-style stories (yes, that's spelled right). Addventure stories, are much like the online component to the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books you may have read as a child. An addventure story is an online, collaborative, interactive fiction in which many authors contribute to a story, each writing discrete segments.

However, now Protagonize is offering the ability for authors to create linear stories, which are more like a traditional novel with chapters. With this option, Protagonize hopes to appeal to a wider audience while also allowing authors to exert more thematic control over their stories.

No matter your story preference, Protagonize is a fun place to enjoy web-based collaborative fiction or explore your own inner author.