Clay Shirky

Writing on the Guardian's books blog, David Barnett reports that a couple of publishers are getting back to basics and doing choose-your-own-adventure books again. He notes a few symptoms of the apparent resurgence.  read more »

• First, the Fighting Fantasy series, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2007, has been reissued in full.
• Second, there's a book called You Are a Miserable Excuse for a Hero, which takes mundane contemporary life as its subject and forces the reader to make decisions like, "If you want to have sex with your ex-girlfriend, consider getting back together with her, then think better of it, go to page 183.
  
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Nicholson Baker, patron saint of lost causes, has announced a new enthusiasm: Wikipedia. “It’s like some vast aerial city,” he writes in The New York Review of Books (March 20, $5.50), “with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.” I think that means he likes it.  read more »

Clay Shirky's essay about power laws and weblogs was published in February, 2003. (It created quite a hubbub back in the day.)

(Also? As much as we enjoy money and the idea of money, wow, we really wouldn't want to be a millionaire in TWX options. Apparently, however, New York mag was so happy to find that Peter Rojas is a bonafide "blogger millionaire" that they couldn't help but say it twice.