- by Anirban Dutta, Web Producer

The news has opened the lid off one of my red-hot beliefs, something I'm fiercely protective about - The human race is NOT getting any less creative.
History has an awe-striking power and I think we sometimes find it easier to believe as superior, characters or events which we have not experienced in person.
Somehow if that event dates back to the black-n-white era we tend to submit to the awe more easily - I don't know if any of you've felt the same way? We feel as if events and characters are not quite as astounding as they used to be. With all my love for history I still hold out against this white wash monopoly of the yester years.

My youth, I often find myself in a duel of the generations, a revered commander of his times, my respected adversary hurls commentary about our generation Y (Gen Y defining blog by Alena)- branding that it is going no-where in terms of creativity and adventure. The battle horn has blown for me and the backdrop is this photo attached - Prise de la Bastille, by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel (Storming of Bastille prison) and I hurl myself like Achilles toward Hector engaging in the fiercest of verbal battles in contemporary martial history.

Although when the dust settles, not much differently than most debates, the two warriors still vehemently hold on to their respective ideologies, as un-touched and clean as James Bond's suit after a fight - news such as this definitely gives me chances of a meatier punch.

The French Revolution, written by Matt Stewart, is the first novel to be released on Twitter!!!

You can follow the novel here.

Matt's story is highly interesting and quite inspiring for the creative community.

He says: "My agent submitted The French Revolution to all the major publishing houses. Many of them loved it, but none were willing to buy what they viewed as a "risky" novel--vivid language, elements of fantasy and farce, raunchy humor. What better place to take risks than Twitter?" in his blog.
Reading the last line again - The publishing houses didn't want to buy his story so he took to Twitter - one of the most powerful social media tools on the web today and wow! Dramatically choosing July 14, Bastille Day, he has started tweeting lines off his book every 15 minutes.

Today he has posted 746 tweets and at this rate he would take 39 days to complete his Twitter novel. He has 984 followers already before the book is published!

What does this mean?

1. As social media facilitates collaboration and instant feedback, Matt and his followers can discuss the plot together. He could seek inputs and merge views to form the final product. This book could be the first collaborative literary work in the world where the author's followers could literally co author a novel.
2. This exercise would automatically create his own community of readers and followers and coupling it to the Social Media power we know how the business can viral into a wildfire.
3. By being his own publisher he can really be limitlessly creative. When Sylvester Stallone decided to make Rocky in 1976, no producer would believe that he could play the lead role. The studio that finally decided to make the film, made it for only $1.1 million and shot relatively fast in 28 days. And the rest is now history.

You know what am I getting at. Powered with Twitter and Youtube to tell his story do you think Stallone would have really cared to beg for his movie being made to the producers, being Rocky, I dont think he would have? If no producer cared to back his endeavours, all Stallone would need today is a Web Producer friend in me to start the fire.

I do not think that creativity has taken a back seat, it is like undermining the potential of the human being, which would be sin.

I think had Tagore been around today he could have started micro-blogging proses of Gitanjali. Raphael could have published School of Athens on Flickr, Einstein could interact and share his wisdom through wikis.
It is the ways of expressing art that has changed, opening new avenues of possibilities undreamed of before and the creative would always make his mark.

14 July or more commonly le quatorze juillet ("14 July"), Bastille Day, a highlight of the French Revolution may have one more reason to be remembered - A Social media revolution, the first novel authored through collaboration and sharing.

We all remember the The Gutenberg Bible being one of the first books printed in Europe, the book that marks the start of the "Gutenberg Revolution" and the age of the printed book - with today's Social media capabilities this could mark the age of the micro-blogged book.

- by Anirban Dutta, Web Producer

Tidal wave?

The concept that has sent a Wave of excitement through the tech and non tech community alike comes from the innovative giant on the web – Google.

They’ve named it Google Wave.

Founders of the Google wave are Lars Rasmussen, Jens Rasmussen (brothers) and Stephanie Hannon - the same team that came up with the Google Maps application.

As Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Google Wave highlights, email was created some 40 years ago, before the creation of the Internet its self and it was done without the experience and knowledge we now have of things such as wikis, social networks, sms, instant messaging and so on. He introduces the Wave as “Google Wave is what email would look like if it was created today”. He says as opposed to emails which try to instantiate a point to point conversation, the Google Wave is "one metaphor for hosted conversations" object hosted on a server somewhere.

The Wave concept typifies an utopian Web 3.0 world where we have all the caliber of Web 2.0 ie emails, IMs, wikis, blogs, bulletin boards, Social networking, sharing and collaboration merged with a much more real time focus; so we have all of the cool stuff happening in a single browser session in a single pane with more enhanced features like we never imagined!

So how does this Sci-Fi set look?

Features like real time translation in 40 languages, contextual spell check, grammar checking and all in one drag drop file sharing, document creation, sharing and editing, starting forums. It certainly packs the thrills of a Spielberg flick!

Plus a very cool feature is its Playback option which lets you refer back to a conversation trail and see which participant added what and at which time and locate the origin of the Wave - each conversation is a wave.

Open Source and the Wave

Google shared its baby with the world at Google's Developer Preview forum Google I/O May 2009

Watch the launch video

Google has actually invited the developer community to participate in the Google Wave program by throwing open a forum to contribute to its features. Majority of the Wave's code is open source and the developers would be given accounts in a sandbox within Google's system  to start developing add on features and extensions to coincide with the launch. This is way too cool.

There is also a feedback capturing mechanism if you wish to be updated on whats going on - Fill up the form

I think I can definitely suggest some cool aliens in this movie on the semi technical side straight to the directorial suit.

The Wave is a platform in iself and it supports robots to automate tasks and functions, embed Waves into external blogs and web sites, “talk” to popular web services such as Twitter collaborate across different platforms, merge other Google tools and gadgets in short Google calls it a "Game changer".

I enhanced my open source knowledge from whurley's podcasts.

I'm not walking the technical line on this red hot topic - there's enough out there on the internet, a particularly good read is the Google Wave guide.

Concerns, resistance to change?

Does this mean the end of the world of CCing and BCCing and SMTP mails and the very recent blogging? How would it impact my business/ Do I have to resort to cloud computing? Would the corporate world accept the wave? Would the concept be scalable enough? These are some of the initial questions that make the tag cloud of this mega project but coming from an organization like Google I have full faith on their to realizing abilities.

My part of the shock was when I realized the concept of the Google Wave was so massive and yet so simple that Social Media would be turned into a subset of this giant - where I always thought Social networking encompasses all - I feel this Tide has a magnitude of possibly redefining Tim Berners Lee's www into World Wide Wave.

Cant wait for the tide to come sweep us over!