[collaborative book]

I've just been reading the Marketing Profs blog again (I highly recommend it) and one of the top five reads of this week is Christina Kerley's post on "The Age of Conversation--a precedent-setting collaborative book by 103 authors hailing from every U.S. time zone, Canada, Australia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, India and Oman."

"In what began as a half dare, the editors, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan challenged bloggers around the world to contribute one page — 400 words — on the topic of “conversation”. The resulting book, The Age of Conversation, brings together over 100 of the world’s leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators in a ground-breaking and unusual publication. And in the spirit of conversation, you can follow-up and extend your interest in the topics covered in the book at the Age of Conversation blog — http://www.ageofconversation.com/."

This collaborative novel is reminscent of DMU's online MA in Creative Writing and New Media's One Million Penguins project. I wonder how it might have evolved if the idea was to produce a printable book rather than a wiki-novel? Perhaps a future project for Penguin and the Master's group...

This also raises questions for the concept of transliteracy and collaboration. Is transliteracy analogous to collaboration and community? To be transliterate must one also approve of the spirit of community and collaboration? How might the individual feature in transliteracy (or is there an "individual"?) I suppose we'll need a way of negotiating the wisdom of crowds and independent thinking.