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Brainstorm

This page is just my scratch pad for brainstorming new ideas, on anything and everything that has to do with this project. It also stores the (half-baked) results of conversations I've had with others.

Transparency (or Why This Page Is Public)

I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing. I have a germ of an idea that I am trying to turn into a real thing by sharing that seed with others in the hopes it will germinate into something more substantial. By keeping this page public an on this site am ensuring that these ideas are:

  • recorded and version-controlled,
  • are viewable by others and thus inspirational to them,
  • can serve as a recruiting tool for me to get other people to join up and participate

How can others participate?

In the obvious case, any talented individual could contribute some great material in the form of raw content. People who write hot, sexy stuff could post that hot, sexy stuff somewhere within this site. However, that alone is so 1995.

So what else can someone do to participate?

At its core, this project can be thought of as a shareable collection of stories, all with the capability of being interlinked (or not) with one another and with other versions and forms of themselves. For instance, rather than trying to "write in sync" with something, a writer can just write and then, after the fact, choose to "sync up with" another story line somewhere else.

But that's just one possibility.

Another possibility is that an author can write different parts of the same story, without worrying about sequence, and then link things up later. This is, in fact, how many writers actually write their stories. Since readers will be encouraged to "jump" (via links) between one part of a story and another, there is less need for linear publishing. Furthermore, because of the nature of wikis, revisions are recorded and saved, making it easier for authors to write stories in such a way.

Perhaps yet another is that these stories don't necessarily have to be textual. They can combine multiple media formats, creating a "mixed multimedia" erotic experience. This is not, of course, the likes of Kink.com's streaming video, but it is a big leap forward from the old 1995-style "illustrated story" porn shorts.

Yet another possibility is the ability to write the same story with multiple people. Instead of the old model where each person writes one section of a story, however, we can harness the power of crowd-sourcing to collaboratively write all parts of a story, or, via configuration changes on a technical level, open up certain parts of the story for public editing while other parts (perhaps an introduction or character-building prologue) remains solely editable by a single person or a core group. This enables a reader to "participate" in the writing of their own erotic literature in a way never before seen.

Again, that's just one other idea. There might be hundreds if not thousands of other uses for such a site as this. I'm just beginning to come up with these ideas myself.

In large part, these ideas are coming up specifically out of conversations with other people, which is exactly why I am reaching out to a few trusted sources for feedback. Talking with others and hearing their questions, being forced to answer them and then explain my answers, will force me to move this project forward and will simultaneously give me a technical direction.

It's always been my intention to open-source the content, so to speak. That said, I understand many people might be protective of what they write, and so we also have the capability to group pages into related "groups" and thus batch-assign individual licenses (such as those available at Creative Commons) to different pieces of writing on the site, should an author desire to do so.

Why this site?

So, from the brainstorm list below, it looks like there are four main reasons:

  1. It's personally engaging to me as the creator.
  2. It's academically interesting from a sociological/sexologist/literary academic point of view.
  3. It's an interesting, titillating, and educational experience for readers.
  4. It's a community-, brand-, and experience-building experience for authors.

The raw braindump of my initial ideas

  • It's fun to read and fun to write! Plus, I get to learn PmWiki, which is new to me.
  • It's a great scratch pad for writing porn stories and jotting down ideas!
  • It's an interesting academic experiment in literature. See also Theory.
    • Nonlinear story telling.
      • story elements like narratives or characters delivered in a non-linear way such as hyperlinked text or images, multiple different viewpoints on the same events perhaps with the capability to switch between them, reading or writing a story in chunks over time, delivery via newsfeed or email…
    • Storytelling in mixed multimedia
    • explore personalization, whereby a user can customize a work to their liking and/or set preferences before hand that actually changes the stories they experience later
  • Community
    • online interaction
    • real world meetings
  • For readers:
    • A new kind of experience in reading online erotica.
    • Multimedia pornography that goes well beyond "I read the magazine for the articles" or the kind of video-niche available from Kink.com's network.
      • Hypertext (text)
      • Audio files?
      • Embedded video? I.e., RedTube, XTube, etc.? The amateur porn equivalents YouTube?
    • Education, plus erotica, all at once! Education is in the form of real solid information and linked to high-quality resources as part of the porn itself.
    • Value-added erotic lit. Think "what will work for me?" In other words, I want to read about porn that gives me ideas for the kind of sex I can have in real life.
  • For authors:
    • Collaboration with others that is fun and easy.
    • Builds a core community, like the Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Wikipedians have.
    • Mix-and-match "fandom" universes easily via hypertextual navigation. Like when Batman shows up in a Superman cartoon. But they're both naked!
    • Provide multimedia versions of story telling. Like motion pictures in the old days created a new form of story telling, so too does this.
    • Personal brand-building opportunity for authors, sex-toy companies, and so forth.
    • Easier to write in small chunks, then link together over time.
    • Supports both "traditional"/"classic" writing styles in terms of linear writing styles as well as hypertextual.
    • A place to practice writing erotica. Can "own" a part of the site—work within "private branches". Optionally share or link to others.

Cool things we might be able to accomplish

(Some of the items in the above section's list should make their way into this list, eventually.)

Distributed story writing

Distributed story writing is also being referred to by some people as wiki-able stories and as remixable stories by others still. This idea has a lot of names, but the idea is the same.

In brief, distributed story writing works very much in the same way as distributed software development (I realize this is a geeky example and might need a better analogy for the future—any suggestions?). Using a distributed version control system, such as git, someone can write a piece of software and save it in a repository. They can then optionally choose to make that repository publicly available. When they do so, other developers can track their changes and pull new changes into their own projects. Some of these projects can then change the code, and re-publish it again.

This is a lot like how I envision what some people are calling "wikiable" stories working.

One author writes a story or a bit of a story. Another author copies it and modifies it. Now we have two versions. Each version's history can be tracked independently, and readers can track whichever version they like best (or both!). Other authors might change different parts of the same story, and re-publish their own version, creating what results in a network of divergent stories with a shared ancestry.

This is especially interesting for those of us into fanfic, for obvious reasons.

Instead of making a new version, though, another possibility is that readers submit suggestions for changing bits and pieces of the story to the author whose version they are reading (kind of like the way software developers trade code patches), creating what amounts to a crowd-sourced story.

Possible obstacles and challenges

Some thoughts on the possible obstacles and challenges a project such as this may face.

Potential for cultural and emotional conflicts

It's quite plausible that the big hurdle in opening up story telling in this fashion becomes cultural or political or emotional, not technical. Authors might feel they deserve ownership of a piece of writing that should be unmodified by others and that should not be replicated in some other form.

Letting everybody alter a story for personal tastes may result in fracases over what is better or more realistic or whatever, different writing styles creating a problem, and the original authors' sense of ownership and entitlement over the work itself.

While this is true, I think more than anything else if the early participants set a culture whereby boundaries are explored and respected before actions are taken we will have gone a long way to helping alleviate some of these concern. Since we are supposed to be advocating that practice anyway, I don't see any better way to do it than leading by example.

Moreover, I think the more people see cool things come out of sharing the more they will be inclined to share "remix rights" with others.

Hypertext fiction is not new

Meta

Stuff about the running of this site itself, its structure, content, context, technological platform, and so forth.

How I might organize this web site

I'm using PmWiki to create this web site. As a result, I've got a number of very useful features I can take advantage of that might work very well for this project. Specifically:

  • Check out PmWiki:WikiTrails and how they can be used to create sequential flows of text, like that which mimics pages or chapters in books.
  • Check out PmWiki:Categories to see how pages on this site can be "tagged" with an appropriate vocabulary. Perhaps the ASSTR Story Codes already provide good categorizations?
  • With a standard specification for certain content areas, (:pagelist:)s are perfect for creating lists of items such as "All the stories written by X person."
  • Content can be grouped in any of these ways to provide a means to "batch" related pages together, such as by author or otherwise. This means that we can alleviate license concerns.

Technical enhancements that could be useful

  • Long pages are hard to read but inevitable in a wiki due to their iterative development nature. Thus, look into Cookbook:PageTableOfContents for a table of contents macro.
  • Since this is a highly textual site, perhaps the Cookbook:PublishPDF recipe is going to come in really handy. It also might even contain the Cookbook:PageTableOfContents recipe that I am sure to want anyway.