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OMG! In da future, we iz all speeking Lolcat!

Cityspeak2.0

In Bladerunner, the diverse ethnic mix of inhabitants of the Los Angeles of the future gives birth to ‘cityspeak‘: a mish-mash of different languages, slang and jargon which helps add to the movie’s unique atmosphere.

It's too bad your language won't live. But then again, whose does?

Although Philip K Dick and Ridley Scott may have had Esperanto more in mind when they chose that device, reality has now caught up with their vision. But it’s not a physical melting pot which has served as a linguistic petri dish: it’s a virtual, online one.

The internet has made the world a smaller place. Skype, Facebook, instant messaging, mobile web: all of these and more have created a place where information, contacts and friends are moments away.

In the fringes of this always-on world lurk the memes and the virals.

They have given us LOLCATS.

They have created phrases like “om nom nom“; and replaced already perfectly efficient words like ‘cat’ with alternatives such as ‘kitteh‘ (why, I wonder, are so many associated with cats? Or, to paraphrase a meme itself, our new kitteh overlords).

The rise of text messaging – and then of Twitter – has also created the banes of many a traditionalist: the acronyms and the truncations. The OMGs and ROFLMAOs; the BRBs and the L8Rs.

The necessities born from a world where time and characters are precious.

Verily, we are all doomed

It is tempting to react to all of these things negatively. To view them as abominations against the (usually) English language.

But consider this: language is not a static, fossilised creature. It is a living, breathing and evolving one. Look back at the language of the past (anywhere from Elizabethan England to 1970s America) and the words and patterns seem archaic and uncomfortable.

Odd. Quaint. Unusable.

I for one welcome our new kitteh overlords

A prophetic LOLCAT..?

Like it or not, online trends and communication is changing the language yet again. And as an indication of our own evolution, we should view this as a positive rather than something to scold our children about.

I’m not naive enough to think we’ll all be speaking in memes and acronyms in the next few decades, nor would I want that to happen; but the influence of current trends will certainly ruffle the pages of the dictionary like a wind of change.

Words like ‘kitteh’ do indeed stand a very good chance of becoming commonly accepted; and the acronyms are most definitely here to stay (even giving rise to candidate phonetic ‘words’ like ‘ohemgee‘).

Trends will come and go; things currently viewed as achingly hip will seem outdated in years to come; but one thing’s certain.

Our language will evolve – and be richer for it.

L8RZ

The Daily – and why it will fail

Posted on February 3, 2011

“New times demand new journalism”

The Daily - worth the hype (and the money?)

So says the tagline for The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s much-fanfared subscription iPad-only newspaper.

Launched amid a flurry of promotional activity in the US yesterday, and available for $99c per week, The Daily promises to exploit technology and multimedia to create a unique experience.

But is it really unique? And will it be the success Murdoch hopes and expects it to be?

I don’t think so…

Selling snow to the eskimos

Say what you like about Murdoch, but with the likes of The Times paywall, he’s not afraid to experiment with new ways of making money out of news in today’s paper-dwindling times.

And, according to Apple, people are hungry for news on their iPhones and iPads, with over 200 million news-based apps having been downloaded to date.

But are these people hungry enough to actually pay for news? Apart from the one-off charge for the apps themselves, many of the news services already being enjoyed are free.

If a consumer is faced with a choice between paying a subscription for content and browsing a free news site or aggregation app, which do they think they’ll choose?

So whilst $99c a week isn’t much, it is still too much.

Long live the king

‘Content is king’ is such an oft-repeated mantra that it’s become a cliche, but a true one nevertheless. The Daily (as with other subscription and paywall-based services) justifies its price by featuring original and unique content unavailable elsewhere.

Which is all well and good, as long as that content is also of a sufficiently high quality. It’s of course too early to judge The Daily’s content in terms of worth, but it had better make sure it’s at least as good as some of the best writing and journalism available – for free – elsewhere.

And once the novelty factor of any iPad newspaper or magazine’s embedded videos, animations and audio segments wears off (as they did with the now extinct ‘interactive CD-ROMs’ of yore), what are you left with? Words and pictures which need to be worth the price of admission.

I want my MTV (and YouTube and Angry Birds)

The Daily's *real* competition

The Daily is only available for the iPad and you can see the logic in that: it’s the best-selling tablet computer currently on the market, and it has a level of kudos associated with it (thanks of course to Apple’s marketing genius).

But what do most people actually use their iPads for? Take a look at the top ten chart in the app store at any point and you’ll see a broad mix of things: from entertainment and productivity to games and – yes – news.

But that’s surely the point the likes of The Daily are missing. The iPad’s ultimately a ‘kick-back, put the TV on in the background and let your mind and fingers click about at random’ device. A multi-purpose, multi-media toy.

With The Daily’s volume of relatively longform content, are people really going to spend an hour or two a day reading it, especially with the call of those Angry Birds making demands on their leisure time?

The news is now social

With the unstoppable march of Facebook and Twitter, the news isn’t just something which happens ‘out there’ any more – increasingly, people are at the centre of their own news channels: as interested in what their friends and their own hyperlocal community are up to as they are with what’s happening on the other side of the world.

Flipboard - Stop press: you and your friends are the news

Apps like Pulse and Flipboard understand this, bringing together feeds from sites you subscribe to with streams from your own social networks.

The result is something which the likes of the The Daily are not: a constantly-updated, quick to browse and personalised news service. A newspaper where you are the editor.

And that’s something I’d probably pay $99c a week for.

Luckily, I don’t have to – the future of news on the iPad and other mobile devices is already here – and it’s free.

Scrivener – Custom Meta-Data vs Keywords

Posted on January 13, 2011

The more I use Scrivener, the more I like it.

I’m the kind of person who gets excited about indexing, filing and cross-referencing, so the tool’s Custom Meta-Data and Keywords features made me very excited indeed.

Keeping track of my creations

One of my Scrivener projects is a novel and I was keen to understand the best way to indicate – and then keep track of – its characters. With each chapter broken down into several scenes, I felt it would be useful to be able to see all the parts of the narrative featuring a particular character, to help:

ensure the characterisation is consistent
to get an overview of that character’s plot strand
see if any one character is dominating the whole work

Custom Meta-Data – close, but not quite…

My first inclination was to use Scrivener’s custom meta-data feature. By default, the tool allows you to give each item a status (‘to do’, ’1st draft’ etc) and a label (‘chapter’, ‘scene’, ‘note’ etc).

Scrivener's Custom Meta-Data panel

Custom meta-data allows you to extend this, adding any other information you think may help. Suggested uses include:

the date / time the scene occurs (Scrivener has no default ‘timeline’ function like some other writing tools, so this can help with that – as segments of writing can be sorted by meta-data value in the tool’s flexible Outline mode)
the location the scene takes place in
the point-of-view character of the scene

This sounded ideal for my needs, but I ran into two difficulties:

I was wanting to have a way of indicating all characters in a scene, not just the POV character
My novel is still in planning stages – there’s at least one character whose name I haven’t completely decided on yet

I ran a quick test. Yes, I could enter multiple names into the ‘characters’ meta-data field I created but this was a bit cumbersome; and it meant I had to manually type the names in each time.

Then, the clincher. Scrivener’s project-wide find and replace is powerful and quick – but it doesn’t cover meta-data. So, if I wanted to change a character’s name later down the line and have the meta-data value update as well, I couldn’t. Not the end of the world – but too messy for my strict librarian tendencies.

Keywords to the rescue

Step forward Keywords. Tags which can be defined once and centrally, then allocated to any item in Scrivener’s file system.

The Keywords HUD in Scrivener

Another test later and they’re perfect for my needs. I now have separate keywords for each character name with these allocated to each scene that character appears in. Adding multiple keywords to scenes is a snap.

And, crucially, editing the value of a keyword automatically updates that value in all scenes its allocated to. Now I’m happy (and so is my strict librarian); and I can happily forge ahead with ‘draft’ character names, knowing I can change them quickly and easily, even when the final draft is complete.

And concentrate on coming up with a better character name than ‘Becca’.

Scrivener

Posted on January 7, 2011

After trialling a few different writing packages for the Mac, I have settled on Scrivener from Literature & Latte.

Scrivener

It’s a dedicated writing and organisation package which is well-suited to storing research, notes and – of course – drafting and organising a large piece of writing.

A pretty complex beast (but with complexity comes great configurable power), it doesn’t have some of the gimmicks of other tools I’ve looked at, but does appear to do everything I need it to do.

I’ll be blogging about my novel on my fiction site, but I’ll be sharing my experiences with Scrivener here – especially as it can be used for all kinds of long-form writing and research, not just for creative writing.

And if anyone has any hints & tips on using the tool, I’d love to hear them…

FourthPage Fiction

Posted on January 2, 2011

I also write fiction – have a look at my FourthPage Fiction site.