I have been listening to This Week In Tech Episode (133) with an interview with Jonathan Coulton, from Feb 24, 2008. It is a very interesting interview with a musician who has developed a scalable and sustainable business model to support artistic endeavors in the Web 3.0 era. He caters to a niche market and gives them high quality content. This is the Robot in the Woods Publishing Model. That is, producing high quality science fiction stories and robot art.

I like that they refer to him as patient zero, because they are accepting that it is not only a viable model, but it is possible for others to do the same. Please take a listen, but in the meantime, here are a few thing I took away from the interview.

• A niche finds you, but community building is key to success. You don’t need to be famous with a 100 million people, but with 10,000 people, and if its the right 10,000, you can make a living out of it.

• Engagement is critical. You should serve exactly the people you want to serve.  That is people that like the same things that you like.    A high quality audience.

• Meritocracy: You can’t fake goodness. Great things, great content, great people and great ideas will float to the top. “I don’t think everything good rises to the top, but it has to be good to rise”

• “I wanna as many people to hear my music, get famous now, figure out how to make money on it later!” Requires an openness thats about more than just making money or getting something for free. Its about giving your access to a set of things that might interest you. In return, for the artist, a transparency about wanting support is an honest approach is required.  I love a business model that thrives in honesty!

• People still like Tangibles!

• Live and die in the niche. You can’t fake quality. You approach it with passion, doing what you want to do, knowing there are others interested in your work. You enjoy it. You are of the niche.

“Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform” - Jason Calanacis, October 3, 2007. For more information about his work, please visit his website or “Slackers of Web 2.0 Unhappy With Calanacis.”

Visualize Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, with an third dimension; the z-axis as a measure of accessibility to professional creativity. Long-tail economics. in tandem with this operational Web 3.0 definition usher an end to the market for one and enables individual access to niche based creative productions. The Zipf-Anderson-Calanacis Conical Constant (ZACCC) seems an appropriate name for an economic model based on a sustainable professional creativity in niche marketing.

Consider Andrew Keene’s Cult of Amateur. He offers the correct assessment that in many economic sectors, the traditional Authority is transferred to individuals and that this transfer has resulted in tangible impacts in the form of job loss and loss of revenue. But social movements often result in economic upheaval, but Keene both acknowledges this transfer of Authority to the individual, and argues that Freidman’s flattening should be curbed. Keene takes swipes at the Surowiecki’s Wisdom of the Crowd mentality, but so does Calanacis. His critique of the Wisdom of the Crowds is entirely unique from Keene’s. Rather than a Keene-like attack the phenomenon, Calanacis requires the emergence of the crowd and of a creative authority not offered by Surowiecki. Oh, and Clay Shirky offers the idea of clout in “Here Come’s Everybody: The Power of Organizing with Organization.”

Some other qualities I am seeing about Web 3.0:

• The Open-Source tends to be open and honest
• It delivers a product people actually want
• It encourages partnerships in creativity
• The Web 3.0 has built-in economic trustability
• Ownership of intellectual property remains important, but new licensing models will emerge
• Creative participation is professionalized
• Craigslist-type sustainability in a shift from profit-driven monetization model to a sustainable business practice, which covers both operational and intellectual labor costs

FYI: I came across this contest today for a short story (2000-6000 words) contest sponsored by The National Space Society (NSS) and Hadley Rille Books. They are looking for science fiction stories that show the adventure of lunar settlement and accepting submissions for stories that deal with humanity’s return to, and colonization of the Moon. Visit www.nss.org or www.hadleyrillebooks.com for updates story guidelines and rules. The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2008.

I love some of the ideas posed by the editors:

• How have we set about establishing a lunar base, and then a colony?
• What are living conditions like?
• What is the lunar wilderness like? What kind of exploring to settlers do?
• What are the buildings like and how do people get around the lunar surface?
• What kinds of transportation do they use to travel to and from the Moon?
• What kind of society lives there? What are the challenges to human social structures?
• Are lunar colonies self-sufficient or do they depend on Earth?
• What kind of industries exist and how do the colonists make use of lunar resources?
• Does the colony resemble Las Vegas or is it more like a science outpost?
• Will there be settlements on the far side — a radio telescope array, perhaps?
• Is the colony located near one of the poles where miners extract ice from the permanently shadowed areas?
• Why have we established a colony on the Moon?

Craig Heck, a science fiction and fantasy writer. His fantasy novel, The Indigo Knight can be found here on Amazon. In “How Brad Learned Math,” Mr. Heck presents us with a story for the juvenile market about an encounter with a robot, unsurprisingly, in the woods. Robot in the Woods Publishing has asked that Mr. Heck develop an outline for a longer treatment of the story. In the meantime, please enjoy this delightful tale of a boy who hates math. Read more

Please see below for the Works of Arthur C. Clarke Read more

Arthur C. Clarke passed away Wednesday, March 18, 2008 in Sri Lanka. He is best known for the screenplay 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on his short story “The Sentinel,” in which the seeds of human evolution are planted with contact from an alien artifact known at the Monolith.
It is strange that I should write about his story, “The 9 Billion Names of God,” days before his passing. In this story, Mr. Clarke gave the world a supercomputer whose sole purpose is to calculate all possible iterations of alpanumeric characters from all human languages in which God is able to be named. In “Rendezvous with Rama,” he gave us an exploration tale of an asteriod carved and converted into a spacecraft by an advanced alien race and succeeds in showing us the psychological and emotional limits human comprehension. His quote below serves as a quick summary of all his stories: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clark.

When I taught my Culture Geography Courses at Piedmont Virginia Community College, this was the first quote I posed to my students simply because it highlights the cultural and evolutionary progress of humanity. This is a theme found throughout the body of his work. Another aspect that informed his writing was traditions of zen, hindu and other forms of Eastern Mysticism. He is also credited for advancing the idea of orbital platforms for mass communications in the 1940s.

Mr. Clarke, I thank you for the work and the world you gave me!

A partial bibliography of his work is below: Read more

For all the writers at Robot in the Woods, Writer’s Weekly, the highest-circulation freelance writing ezine in the world, is hosting a 24-hour short story contest. This could be an interesting opportunity for sharing your talent.

The story topic will be delivered at noon on April 26, 2008 and you will have 24 hours to write, edit and deliver. There is a $5 entry fee. You can find out how more information about prizes and for how to enter here.

Robot in the Woods is proud to debut its first short fiction piece by Science Fiction author Michael Ugulini. Mr. Ugulini is a freelance writer located in Toronto, Canada. Three of his short scripts have recently won awards, including First Place in the American Gem Short Screenplay Competition (2006) for his screenplay PARCHED. For more information about Mr. Ugulini, please visit his website.

DAYS ON THE WIND FARM, by Michael Ugulini

She watched me from the crest of the hill, which overlooked the water. I had beached my canoe to rest from a long morning’s paddling along the coast, and I was ready to eat some lunch. She was maybe forty-five, with shoulder length blond hair, and wore a blue summer dress, which caught the breeze like the giant wind turbines that towered over her fifteen yards behind.

These, in fact, had caught my eye as I traversed the coast. There were at least a dozen of them spread along a wide expanse of farmland, impressive to see as their white blades cut the air. Others had told me about them, how they had changed the landscape, and were providing electricity to a town down in the valley. Farms in other parts of the country were leasing out space for these as well, as sources of income. People said it was common now to see fields of robot-workers moving their metal arms along rows of crops in synchronicity with the spinning blades above them. Read more

Ever read “The 9 Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke? In this story, Clarke imagines a number-crunching supercomputer generating all possible combinations of letters/symbols in which God can be named. The story can be found here.

Artists and authors of any age, level of expertise, medium, and style are encouraged to participate in a similar project. Its a fun new portfolio development and art commissioning project called Robot in the Woods.

I am developing a website where all images are renderings of the phrase “Robot in the Woods” by different artists/styles. I have been conducting little experiments and when I mention to friends, everybody conjures up something different in their mind (what did you think of?) I envision this as a tool for the self-representing artist to display and promote thier portfolio.

• Welcome to the Robot Revolution
• An Animator’s Chronicle
• Bennet RobotWorks - Amazing Robot Sculpture
• Craig Berry’s Science Fiction Art
• Low Tech Times
• Proudly Destroying All Non-Robots Since 1974
• Radrobot
• Raygun Revival - Thrilling Tales from Beyond the Ether
  RRobots - R. Nick Kuszyk - Wow, great art it is very reminiscent of an R. Crumb piece
• Suicide Bots Hot Bot on Bot Action
• Elfwood - The World’s Largest Site for Science Fiction & Fantasy Art
• A Builder of Real Life Robots
• Mr. Future