Narrative and Weblogs: the Blognovel

Diego writes "A few days ago I started Plan B -- a blognovel as a way of exploring the narrative constraints created by a weblog, and whether it is at all possible to use it as an artistic medium to produce interesting work. It also presents some interesting challenges on the UI side: what kind of navigation to use besides the basic calendar navigation of the blog? How could it be made obvious that it's not intended to replace print or even ebooks? I thought the slashdot community would have a lot useful things to say about all of these issues. I've also put together a short intro page and a FAQ that I think will be useful to start the conversation: What is Plan B? and the Plan B FAQ."

Comments

Very similar concept to Memento

[OneStepFromElysium]

Memento used a storytelling style very similar to what you are describing. In fact, it's easy to see that story being done in a blog style.

Read slashdot at -1

[sulli]

and you'll see all sorts of interesting stories. Novels, no, but not short either!

Fictional blog community

[mattbelcher]

I had the idea a while back of creating a whole fictional community of blogs through which to tell a story. Basically, I would set up a network of sites, one for each character, and they would relate the events of the story from their own points of view. Characters that knew one another would have links to each other's sites, thus informing the reader of the connections. This approach might lead to something more like War of the Worlds and other fictional journalism, as opposed to a fictional diary, as in the proposed work.

when did the blog...

[Sebastopol]

Ok, so I've been surfing since Mosaic 1.0 in 1994, and ftp'ing pr0n for zurich.ai.mit.edu since 1990, and the first time I heard of a 'blog' was a few months ago. The odd thing is, this discussion of blogs came out of the news websites and not the nerd websites.

when the hell did blogs become so famous? and are they just the modern equivalent of .plan? i get the impression they are the creation of low-tech people in the high-tech world. not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, but it took me by surprise that it became such a phenomenonemon.

?