The Open Author

I find the idea of crowdsourcing interesting. Crouwdsourcing is the idea of getting a large group of people to help you out in a project. You pay them a bit of cash, or give them a promise of possible cash, and they do the work for you. Examples might include the X-Prize, or the Netflix Prize. If you want to get in on the money side of crowdsourcing, you can check out Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Anyway, I’m a big fan of boardgames, and Days of Wonder, a top notch publisher of some very good games, has either knowingly, or unknowingly, started crowdsourcing their game design. They held a contest to see who could come up with interesting characters in one of their games. One person had such an interesting idea they are making an expansion to the original game.

Maybe we need a few open-source games, just to see what the wisdom of the crowds can come up with.

Image Courtesy of masmad.

I’ve had a lot of life changes in the past few months, and those changes have rippled to other aspects of my life. One change is that I’ve no longer been able to meet with my old critique group. Since I’m staying down in SLC, it’s just too hard to go to the meetings.

Through pure chance, I happened to go out for frozen custard at this year’s storymaker conference with a great group of folks. I got chatting with a few up and coming writers, and over the months I’ve exchanged e-mails and followed their blogs. Through the course of the discussion we came up with the idea of starting our own critique group.

Tonight was our first meeting. Or rather, the first time we got together to talk about a book. And that book was mine.

It was a great experience. They started off by telling my how much they loved my book. They went on and on until my neck muscles were straining, trying to keep my big head upright. “Tomorrow,” I thought. “Tomorrow I’ll have agents beating down my door, trying to get me to sign up with them”.

And then they tore my book apart. Not the kind of tearing that makes you give up and feel discouraged, but the kind of straight-to-the-point, useful, hard-to-hear-but-exactly-what-you-need-to-hear kind of tearing. The feedback was incredible. They didn’t pull punches, but those punches were precisely placed. Everything they said rang true.

I came away with two things last night. Five talented writers think my book is really good, and five talented writers told me how my book can be even better.

Time to get working.

My wife has started a blog. So for those of you who know both me and my lovely wife, feel free to check it out.

Just ignore the picture of me when I was 23. I looked like a dork. Not the stunning image of grace and strength you all know me as now.

Wow, when you work two jobs, have a 190 mile commute, and don’t have internet access in the evenings, there isn’t much time to blog. But I did want to drop a line as I was mentioned and quoted in an article on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog. You can read the article here.

My favorite part of when the gentleman was interviewing me was when he asked about my blog. David Wiley had told him that this was my blog. But then it had this bizarre title. And the guy listed on the side was Matthew Buckley, not Marion Jensen. Was this really my blog?

After I explained the methods behind my madness, all was good.

I’m a nice guy. A really nice guy. You’ve seen other blogs that give away a book to one lucky reader? Those guys are pretty nice. But I’m even nicer. I’m going to give a book away to everybody reading this post.

That is right, not one book for one person, but multiple books for multiple people. The book is a good one. I’ve just started reading it, but I’ve followed the author, Chris Anderson, ever since his Long Tail days. He’s a smart cookie.

I know what you’re thinking. “Stop typing and get to that part about the free book.” OK, the book is called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. It will be interesting to most of you, but should be particularly interesting to many of you, especially my fellow authors out there. Many industries have already struggled with the concepts Anderson covers in his book–the newspaper industry, for example, is currently in the throes of it–and book publishers are about to follow suit.

Seriously, if you are an author, you need to read this book.

Now, about your free copy…I’m not going to buy you the boring hard cover. You can only read that if you’re not driving, exercising, deep-sea diving, making deviled eggs, or doing sign language. No, I’m going to buy you the audio version of this book, read by the author himself. That is right, you can listen to the book while doing just about anything except for cleaning your ears with cotton swabs.

So, go to iTunes, do a search for ‘free future radical’ and you will see the audio book. What I’ve done is track all of your IP addresses, and pre-paid for a copy of the book. That is why is appears as ‘free’ on your iTunes. That’s right, I’m just that tech-savy, and I’m just that nice.

And if you like the audio version, consider buying a hard copy for your editor. They will need it sooner than they like to think.

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to wear iPods,
and a time to leave iPods at home.

Ecclesiastes 3:1

My wife dragged…er, I mean invited me to go camping with her and the kids last night. We had a fun time swatting mosquitoes, eating raw food, sleeping on gravel, and listening to teenagers drive up and down Green Canyon all night.

This morning, I reluctantly pulled myself away from this veritable carnival, and went for a bike ride. I made my way slowly up the canyon on the wonderful single trail.

Before I left, I thought about taking my iPod. I enjoy listening to podcasts, or music, but I hesitated taking my tunes along with me. If I had those buds stuck in my ears, I may not be able to hear other bikers, cars, or marauding bears. I finally decided to leave the tunes back, and head up with just my thoughts to keep me company.

I got bored really quick.

Anyway, I was about a half mile from the top; the path had a steep ravine on the left, and a steep wall of dirt on the right. The trail was narrow, and there wasn’t a lot of room for one bike, let alone two.

My bud-free ears thought they heard something. I wasn’t sure, but it almost sounded like…

Before I could decide what the noise was, a biker, going what looked like to be almost the speed of sound, shot around a bend about 10 yards in front of me came . He was tearing it up.

I didn’t want to leap down the ravine, as gravity and I have never really had a good relationship. So I threw myself and my bike to the right, up against the wall of dirt. At the same time, I yelled, “Ho, ho!”

Why I choose that moment to quote Old St. Nick, I can’t really say, but I’m glad I did. You see, the guy coming down the trail wasn’t listening to an iPod either. He slammed on his brakes, and was just doing about 90 mph when he rode past me on the left. He hollered over his shoulder “Three more coming!”

I hugged and caressed the side of the mountain until I saw three more blurs zoom by, and then I continued my slow ascent to the top.

So, there you have it. Another post brought to you by Matthew Buckley where he does little more than recount a slightly interesting story, and then states the obvious.

Tune in next week when I discuss why you don’t want to drive with your teeth.

Have we really gotten this desparate for advertising dollars?

For those that run ads on their sites, you know you get money if somebody clicks on the ad, but you also get money if somebody just comes to the site (much less, but a little).

So the other day I am looking to see if there are any tutorials for the Sicilian Language (never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line). I find a link to About.com and this is what I see.

Can you find the content? There are five pages, each with about 2-3 sentences. The link I just gave you only had a single sentence of content. Everything else on the page is advertisements. You get a paragraph of material, and they make you wade through five pages to get it. And it doesn’t even link to any real language tutorial, is just babbles on about random Sicilian history.

But then again, who am I to argue against progress? My next blog post will be spread out across 49 pages, and you’ll get 2-3 words per page.

Thank heavens for the EFF.

Speaking of falls…

The family went to Bear Lake on Friday. We went with our good friends the Harpers. They took us out on their boat, and showed us how they can both ‘surf’ behind their boat. The boat makes a wave, and they can surf for a long time, without even hanging onto the rope.

They asked me if I wanted to try, and of course, I said…YES! Here are the results.

I gave it my best shot, several times, but just couldn’t get up. I didn’t feel too bad. I figured if I really kept trying, I’d get it eventually. But we had 10 kids, and 3 adults in the boat. They had better things to do than watch me nose dive into Bear Lake all afternoon.

Then my wife said she’d like to try. On her second try, this is what happened.

She tried several more times, and did great! I was amazed. She has as much experience as I do (i.e. none), and yet she was doing it!

I decided to give it one more shot. My wife made it look so easy; she had inspired me.

I got back into the water, grabbed the rope and…

It was absolutely exhilarating. I don’t know what changed. It may have been the simple fact that I had seen somebody else do it, and I realized it was possible. Whatever it was, I’m glad I hopped in the water one last time, and tried again.

I’ve spend the last four years working on USU OCW. I have seen the incredible amount of traffic we get, but I think deep down I’ve always worried that maybe nobody really used the site. Maybe all that traffic was people just coming across information, realizing it wasn’t that helpful, and then leaving. Maybe all my work, and the work of the professors, was for naught.

Then a few days ago, I was asked to create a Flash file. I opened Flash and quickly became lost. I thought to myself, “If only I could find a good set of tutorials on the web.” Then I remembered…Andy Walker…Intro to Flash.

Thirty seconds later I was watching Professor Walker’s video, and learning Flash. I realized it’s not just an academic exercise, but something that helps real people in their real lives.