Young Creatives Want Social Media Scrapbooks part 2, "Digital Books, Social Media, and the Open Mesh"

Doug Millison & Sarah & the oysters
Photo by Marc Canter, blogged immediately
after he snapped it. Of course, Little Mo had to get
in the act, too. Took me 1 minute to mash up their images
with this photo at http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com


My Nonhuman Communications partners and I did not set out to create a new kind of book, or a new kind of online reading experience for social media.

We started with a character, a story, and a vision for a book.

In the process of collaborating online on the project, co-writer Steve Porter, illustrator Srayla Tip, and I discovered that we needed social media tools and online creative tools to write, edit, and publish the book that we envisioned.

The Concrete Jungle Book is what we call a prose+comics scrapbook novel. TCJB mashes together:

--100 pages of traditional prose narrative, presenting the story from the human POV of Little Mo, his family, and friends.
--100 pages of visual storytelling, comic book style, that presents the story from the POV of the nonhuman characters - urban animals who help Little Mo in his quest for revenge against Sherikano and his nonhuman avatar Shere Khan the Tiger.
--100+ scrapbook pages, collages containing photos, drawings, diary extracts, quotes and factoids copied from Little Mo's favorite books, clipped from magazines and newspapers and from online sources.

Co-author Steve Porter lives in Oak Cliff, Texas. Srayla Tip and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. We used Google Docs to view and agree on revisions to prose narrative, comics, and scrapbook pages.

Next, we brought a small group of designers, artists, and book industry professionals to review our evolving draft. They provided feedback directly in our Google Docs pages, and by email. We also showed them hardcopy in person. We incorporated many of their suggestions in the Adobe InDesign book layout.

We wanted to get feedback from as many readers as possible in our target audience, too. Would they enjoy our prose+comics scrapbook novel hybrid?

Enter Chen Xiang, a Web developer then working at Art.com. Xiang had developed a simple tool to create comic strips and single panel cartoon by uploading photos or other images, then slapping on word balloons, captions, and text. HTML, not flash. He calls it Comicater.

Chen Xiang built a test site for us at http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com where we could display the pages of our first draft as a series of jpgs, and use Xiang's tool to let our Beta testers add Comments by typing in a text box, AND by adding new graphical elements, collaging their visual suggestions right on top of our digital page image.

We used Flickr to identify groups and individuals of people who appeared to share Little Mo's love of graphic novels and comics, streetart, and edgy scrapbooking. We figured if they liked to do the same things that Little Mo does, they are likely to enjoy reading his novel. We manually searched and read thousands of Web sites, blogs, Facebook and Twitter profiles, and identified hundreds more specific individuals likely to enjoy The Concrete Jungle Book. We started inviting them to come and Preview our book online.

After the San Francisco Chronicle published a favorable article about our project in July last year, and after BoingBoing.net linked to our site in August, traffic increased.

By now we have assembled a virtual online community that numbers more than 2,500 people who claim a relationship with Little Mo, our book, our Nonhuman Communications project. And they tell us they are ready to buy our book, t-shirts, and related products. We're nearly ready to start selling them, too.

WHY SCRAPBOOKS?

By definition a scrapbook can display a variety of elements, visual and textual, taken from their original contexts and presented in the scrapbook as part of the story the scrapbook creator is telling.

"Scrapbooking" is what people have been doing online for several years, in our view, as they combine multiple media types and content in Web sites, blogs, social media site profiles.

The printed version of The Concrete Jungle Book will go into bookstores and other retails locations where customers will buy it, beginning later this year. We are still looking for publishing and co-marketing partners to help us with this part of the project.

The printed book takes customers to http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com where they can meet fellow readers, discuss the book with them, become friends with them in the social media way as they thus connect via shared interests. There they already use a prototype version of our first Social Media Scrapbook.

We will also publish TCJB in a digital version, available online in our Web site, and in a Facebook version. We will test various price points, from free to premium. Plus iPhone, Kindle, and on other relevant platforms.

In the fully developed Social Media Scrapbook version of The Concrete Jungle Book, readers from our tribe not only read and discuss the book online, they can chat with Little Mo and the other characters via IM-style messages. While they enjoy the book online, solo or together with friends, they can also listen to a soundtrack they create from their own song playlists.

These young reader/co-creators show Little Mo what they can do by adding their own art and words right on top of Little Mo's digital pages. They see how their friends have tagged up, mashed up, annotated, illustrated the book pages, and, like graffitiwriter streetartists, they "tag up" their friends' creations by slapping more art and text on top. The same way that fresh air, impromptu collages appear on the walls in public spaces, as artists add their tags, stickers, paste-ups, in assymetical collaboration.

The same way that streetartists can come together to plan and paint a mural, reader/co-creators can meet to co-author and co-edit their additions to The Concrete Jungle Book. Some of them use our site to create cartoons, comic strips, and multi-page graphic novels that have nothing to do with TCJB - they simply enjoy the creative process and sharing the results with their friends.

They are doing it online right now, in the rough prototype version of this vision, at http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com.

In our vision, a printed copy of the Social Media Scrapbook is a treasured souvenir of a rich social media experience that includes reading, discussing with friends, and creative sell-expression and creative collaboration.

We will also let reader/co-creators add their own pages to create, and purchase via print-on-demand, a personalized version of The Concrete Jungle Book. Instead of paying $20 for a trade edition, they can create their own front and back cover, add pages, do whatever they like, then order a print-on-demand copy for a premium price, with profit margin that will make traditional book publishers drool.

In fact, we have the capability to do this now with the same P.O.D. vendor we used to print galley proof copies of the TCJB Beta edition. We have the ability to insert reader art contributions and print out a personalized copy on demand. This is currently a clumsy, kludgy process that we need to streamline and automate more fully.

Our reader co-creators will also be able to sell their own creations, and mash-ups made with TCJB art and text, via print-on-demand, with Nonhuman Communications, and its publishing partners, collecting a commission for making that possible.

They also tell us, when they visit http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com, that they want TCJB t-shirts, caps, posters, blank scrapbooks to collect print-outs the pages they create with us online. They want to read and purchase other graphic novels, comic books, and novels by other authors and artists. We will accommodate their desires.

Now we need to improve the site, add more and better social media tools, add more and better creative tools. We need help to do this, and actively seek partners to help us do this. Our goal is to use Marc Canter's vision of the Open Mesh to make The Concrete Jungle Book, and its sequels, available in socialmediaspace everywhere.

We are a small team of writers and artists. Would you like to help us take this project to the next level?

If you're interested, contact Doug Millison by email, dougmillison@comcast.net, on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dougmillison. Follow me, http://twitter.com/LittleMo92

Thank you for your kind attention.

Next in the series:
We Need a Widget: How Reader/Co-creators are helping to create the sequel to The Concrete Jungle Book & helping to grow the community.

See it live on the Web right now:
http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com, read/collaborate Preview of a new prose+comics scrapbook novel ("graphic novel on steroids") demonstrating key elements of the emerging digital book for social media, what we call a Social Media Scrapbook.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/03/NS2V11EUE2.DTL
The Concrete Jungle Book: A different animal
by Trevor Hunnicutt, San Francisco Chronicle
Thursday, July 3, 2008




The scrapbook presentation page for our lunch
with Marc Canter yesterday.

Digital Books, Social Media, and the Open Mesh, (1st in series)

Little Mo here, continuing my San Francisco Bay Area tour with mentor & business partner, Doug Millison.

Today we met multimedia innovator & Web visionary, Marc Canter, to talk about our Nonhuman Communications publishing project.


Marc Canter
photo from his blog
http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/

This is the first in a series of blog posts about Digital Books, Social Media, and the Open Mesh.

Doug and Marc met in the early 1990s, after Doug co-founded and edited Morph's Outpost on the Digital Frontier (http://MorphsOutpost.com), a technical magazine in the form of an underground newspaper. Morph's Outpost identified and served the emerging "tribe" of artists, storytellers, movie makers, educators, and tool makers, who came together to create interactive multimedia software and publish it on CD-ROM and online.

Well before the Information Superhighway became the metaphor, Canter was helping pave the way for multimedia on personal computers, on the Web, and now in socialmediaspace. In June 1994, Canter featured prominently in the seminal ART TECO conference at Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, that Doug organized with his Morph's Outpost colleagues, for the emerging multimedia designer/developer tribe.


Doug Millison & Sarah & the oysters
Photo by Marc Canter, blogged immediately
after he snapped it. Of course, Little Mo had to get
in the act, too. Took me 1 minute to mash up their images
with this photo at http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com

I, Little Mo, was a mostly fly on the wall at today's meeting.

Although, I observe that it's my tribe -- the emerging community of young (and young at heart) streetartists and graffiti writers, cartoonists, edgy scrapbookers, funky art journal writer-painters, Moleskine sketchbook sketchers graphic novelists, mad poets, film makers, musicians, podcasters, bloggers, and the rest of you do-it-yourself, hands-on, boundary-crossing, digital/analogue creative tribe -- that lurked around the edges of their animated, arm-waving, exhilarating discussion this afternoon.

My tribe: teenagers and 20-somethings, mostly, screenagers every one. We use iPhones and iPods, WiFi, DVDs. Some of us like books, some don't. But we love to interact with cool Web editorial and visual content. When given a chance, we love to read, discuss, and play with books online. That's what we're doing together at http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com prototype right now.

We met for lunch at the Walnut Creek Yacht Club. Not a boat in sight but amazing seafood.

Marc had proposed the following menu:

Order - Intro to the issues
Appetizers - Background
Entree- Brainstorming
Dessert - Hypothesis - Float a Solution


Doug Millison & Sarah & the oysters
Photo by Marc Canter, blogged immediately
after he snapped it. Of course, Little Mo had to get
in the act, too. Took me 1 minute to mash up his image
with this photo at http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com

Order - Intro to the issues

Our delightful waitress, Sarah described in delicious detail each of the dozen varieties of oysters on offer, Marc ordered half a dozen of the creamy Kumamotos and half a dozen of the briny Cortez Island. As we reveled in the oysters, followed by perfect deep-fried calimari, Doug outlined our Nonhuman Communications vision for books in socialmediaspace.

Appetizers - Background

Millions of books have been digitized, we can buy them an discuss them online. Yet people can't use books in social media environments the way they use photos, video, and audio/music content.

We're building into digital books a set of social media tools, such as people already use in Facebook, Flickr, and other social networking sites. First efforts at our prototype Web site are rough and ready, but enough to show the potential…and some surprising results.

Thus books can serve -- as photos, videos, and music files already do -- as vehicles to help readers connect with people in social media environments.

With built-in social media tools, the digital book helps previously isolated readers find like-minded friends, people who are reading the same or similar books.

The digital book in socialmediaspace comes equpped to connect readers with the online equivalent of the book clubs they enjoy out there in the dead tree/meatspace world and other online versions of their favored activities with books.

For example, in the fleshworld, book club members bring to their discussions their books all stuck full of Post-It's and hand-written marginalia noting points to discuss, post cards and photos of places mentioned in the book that the reader has visited or researched, & etc.

What do you do with all that stuff when you're meeting other book lovers online, in socialmediaspace?

We believe that when you read a digital book online it should also include creative tools that let you annotate, manipulate, and play with the digital book the same way you can now play with digital photos, video, and audio/music in social media environments online.

Mash it up, mix it up, tag it, the way streetartists and graffiti writers create and collaborate as they move through the streets of the city.

Tools to let the reader annotate and illustrate the digital book. Tools that let the reader share these annotations and illustrations with friends and colleagues in social media environments online.

Readers become co-creators, in other words, adding their textual and visual comments to the pages of the digital book, sharing them with friends.

In the right environment – the simple test-bed site at http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com, the first Nonhuman Communications implementation of a digital book for social media – readers can use these same annotation/illustration tools to create and publish their own digital books in our Web site, too. They are doing it right now.

The digital media book with social media tools lets previously passive book consumers become co-creators, authors, and publishers.

Entree- Brainstorming

As we feasted on West Indian "Pepperpot" soup, and fresh fish entrees, Marc led some serious brainstorming.

Structured content. Consistent, persistent tags. Digital book equivalents to photo collections and playlists. Everything a url that lives in the "cloud" so it can be reconfigured to meet future needs as they arise. How to build a digital book platform that takes advantage of the 2-way API's that Marc proposes to connect today's social media islands and silos. How to prepare to sort reader contributions into a wiki, how to prepare for applications we don't know about yet because they haven't been invented.

We'll dig into these topics in future posts. Marc explains many of them in detail in his book, How to Build the Open Mesh, and in the video of his recent conference presentation in Rotterdam, linked below.

Suffice to say, we've got our work cut out for us at Nonhuman Communications. But we're on the right path.

We've already gathered a small but growing tribe and have engaged them on http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com, at Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and elsewhere in socialmediaspace.

Some 2,500 souls claim some kind of relationship with me, Little Mo, with our book The Concrete Jungle Book, with our Nonhuman Communications project.

At http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com, and soon in a Facebook version of the Web site, members of our growing online tribe read the Beta edition and use simple annotation/illustration tools, to move from passive media consumption to active co-creation and collaboration, as reader/co-creators add their images and words, mashing up our book's pages with their own content.

These tribe members/readers/online co-creators & collaborators have already given us priceless feedback to the Beta edition -- feedback we've incorporated in the 1st Edition that we're preparing now for publication, in print for bookstore distribution and digital for iPhone, Kindle, and other relevant delivery devices, later this year.

We know the target audience loves our book, because they've helped us to fine-tune and shape it, and we've added our own artistry and imagination to exceed their expectations.

That's how we figured out that digital books need social media tools, and annotation/illustration tools in the first place, in the process of collaborating online – Steve Porter, Doug Millison, and me, Little Mo – to create the first draft, then inviting our friends to help us make it better with their feedback, delivered online as we began giving them simple tools to enable the feedback.

In other words, we're already demonstrating online, a live community of readers who are using a prototype of the digital book for social media. A rough prototype, but the functions can be seen.

Dessert - Hypothesis - Float a Solution

Sweet comes last, simple flan and fantastic chocolate mousse…and talk of monetization. Marc drilled into the four major revenue streams we've identified that flow from and through this new kind of digital book in socialmediaspace.

We've got our work cut out for us there, too. But, again, we're on the right path. The tools and technology we need are out there to implement our vision and carry it to fruition, beyond the rough and ready prototype that serves as the test bed at http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com.

In the next blog post in this series, we explain why the interactive scrapbook is the digital book format that our tribe prefers, and how the simplest of online creative tools can serve our tribe members' most complex creative needs.

After lunch, Marc drove us in his amazing Checker taxi cab – yes! big enough for a party inside – to our car, and we reached our overarching conclusion:

We believe that as digital books move into social media, we come full circle. McLuhan observed that before the printing press, readers were writers, copying and compiling books in manuscript, or hiring scribes to do it.

With the printing press, authors emerged, and readers became mostly passive consumers.

Now, in online social media environments, readers once more become writers, illustrators, authors.

We're demonstrating it right now.

Thank you for your kind attention. We look forward to your Comments and Questions.

Resources

Here's the scrapbook page we made for today's discussion with Marc Canter:




Contact Doug by dougmillison@comcast.net, on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dougmillison. Follow me, http://twitter.com/LittleMo92

http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com, live Preview of a new prose+comics scrapbook novel ("graphic novel on steroids") demonstrating key elements of the emerging digital book for social media, what we call a Social Media Scrapbook.

Marc Canter on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Canter
Read Marc's blog http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/
Learn about the Open Mesh in a fun video, http://blip.tv/file/1377855
Read his state-of-the-art book, How to Build the Open Mesh http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/564581

Walnut Creek Yacht Club
http://www.walnutcreekyachtclub.com
1555 Bonanza St
Walnut Creek, CA 94596
(925) 944-3474

Publish your art in our new TCJB SCRAPBOOK EDGE book, for FREE

http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com says: THE CONCRETE JUNGLE BOOK SCRAPBOOK EDGE a print-on-demand book/online project edited by Morris Armstrong, Jr. proudly a.k.a. Little Mo, Doug Millison, and Steve Porter. Little Mo here, inviting you to participate, at no cost, FREE, no gimmicks, no strings, in THE CONCRETE JUNGLE BOOK SCRAPBOOK EDGE, a new print-on-demand, collaborative book project. TCJB SCRAPBOOK EDGE includes a series of scrapbook pages/collage works that we've decided to publish separate from THE CONCRETE JUNGLE BOOK prose+comics scrapbook novel, the 350 page graphic novel on steroids that's coming later this year. Scrapbook pages and other contributed art works should express a mix of urban, industrial, natural imagery plus the strong, authentic emotions that characterize the scrapbook aesthetic of THE CONCRETE JUNGLE BOOK. By publishing via print-on-demand, we can easily add pages from more artists as they decide they want to get involved. We will simply update the book pdf with new pages and the revised edition will immediately be available to purchase from the print-on-demand vendor. Depending on how many other artists choose to include their pages, TCJB SCRAPBOOK EDGE will be between 50-100 pages, full color, 8" X 10" paperbound, printed by ComiXpress.com. Cost will be between $8 - $12 per copy, not including shipping. Contributing artists will be responsible for obtaining and submitting high-quality, high-resolution images of their works, suitable for publication. We will provide specifications. Contributing artists can purchase multiple copies to sell to their friends. The idea is to create a cool book and use it as a calling card for our other projects. If demand develops and more people want to purchase copies, we can fairly share profits among contributors. All fair, open, transparent. Contributing artists retain ownership and control of their art works, granting only rights relevant and necessary to this project. My partner Doug Millison has founded and managed substantial publishing projects, see http://MorphsOutpost.com as a good example with design relevance to this project. We will design and get the book ready to print. The design will fit the look & feel of THE CONCRETE JUNGLE BOOK which you can Preview in this web site. You can see more examples of edgy scrapbook art at the Flickr group Scrapbook Edge that I started http://www.flickr.com/groups/scrapbookedge/ TCJB SCRAPBOOK EDGE will also include images of streetart/graffiti pieces, sticker combo collaborations, & etc. This is an important part of the mix. CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS include: Srayla Tip illustrator of THE CONCRETE JUNGLE BOOK Fred "Sundanse" Gromadski of Oakland AS Crew, creator of Adventures of Morph comic strip, http://MorphsOutpost.com Jiri Szeppan, Royal Belgian Film Museum http://www.flickr.com/photos/jiriszeppan/ Doug Millison, co-author THE CONCRETE JUNGLE BOOK Steve Porter, co-author, THE CONCRETE JUNGLE BOOK More artist announcements to come. Stay tuned. First Edition of TCJB SCRAPBOOK EDGE to be published via print-on-demand this Spring 2009. Send email to my partner pynchonoid@yahoo.com if you are interested, or Direct Message to http://twitter.com/dougmillison or me, http://twitter.com/LittleMo92. http://www.flickr.com/groups/scrapbookedge/ About Scrapbook Edge Scrapbook Edge a place to share and discuss scrapbook pages with attitude…and, maybe, stretch the boundaries of what we can do with our scrapbook pages. The group pool features photos/scans of physical scrapbook & digital scrapbook pages & elements that could go on a scrapbook page. Many photographers compose images that combine image, text, layers, memories in a single frame or snap. Artists transform walls and other public surfaces of an urban landscape into "pages" - a kind of a scrapbook, too. And, where to draw the line - art journal? collage? altered book collage? mixed-media? comic strips at the bleeding edge? Who knows? Eclectic. Authentic. Subversive. Suggest a key word.