“Arriving late, I’d just missed Angus Bankes’s presentation but made it just in time to see Michael Smith take the platform. In his opinion, The Next Big Thing would be companies that kept things simple rather than building complicated web services which most people couldn’t understand and wouldn’t use. An interesting view from a man who invents puzzles for a living, I thought.”

A busy day today, despite the heat in the Valle today making it impossible to work for more than half an hour without breaking off for a game of water balloon dodgeball (more on that later).

Probably the second most frequently asked question I get asked about the book - after “what’s it about?” - is “who’s in it?”

Of course what most people really mean when they ask that is “am I in it?”, which is a tricky one given that there’s no right answer. The questioner looks absolutely horrified if the answer is yes, and bitterly disappointed if the answer is no.

So to avoid future awkwardness, and as a service to the curious, I decided to put together a reasonably representative list of most of the people who are mentioned in the book in any significant way (as opposed to those mentioned purely in passing). And to make it more interesting both to read and to compile, I decided to write the descriptions in haiku form.

The result is today’s Book Extra: The Cast of Characters In Handy Haiku Aide Memoire Form.

It’s also yours to mash up under the same Creative Commons license as the Prologue (and indeed everything else on this site).

Enjoy!

…

Speaking of mashing things up, when I decided to release The Book under a Creative Commons license (sic), I wasn’t entirely sure what it would mean.

Which is to say, I knew what it would mean - I’m not a total fucking idiot - but I wasn’t sure what it would MEAN for such a relatively short extract, beyond people feeling a bit more free to forward it around.

And that’s the whole point of Creative Commons - you do your creative bit and then you release it into the wild and let others apply their creativity from where you left off. The excitement in seeing what other people do with your work is your reward for making it available.

So, you can imagine my delight when I saw Michael Smith’s Twitter update an hour or so ago…

@acton: “tag cloud for the prologue to @paulcarr’s new book: http://tinyurl.com/6kf5nn“

A tag cloud! Of course!  Brilliant!

For the uninitiated, a tag cloud - in this context, at least - is a visual representation of the words and phrases featured in a piece of text. The more times a word is featured, the larger it appears in the cloud. Here’s Michael’s tag cloud for the Prologue…

As I say, brilliant! I love that the biggest word is “media” closely followed by “I’m”. What a wanker, eh? And that despite the fact that there are numerous people and companies mentioned in the text, only Alex Tew, Angus Bankes, Nick Denton, Moreover and Benchmark are featured significantly enough to make it into the cloud.

So, yes, do let me know if you do anything interesting with the Prologue (which you can download here, by the way) or the Cast of Characters - creative@bringingnothing.com. Books and other exciting prizes await.

(Incidentally, I’ve updated the license on the Prologue now. It was a no derivative works license which would technically make what Michael did a breach of the license. Now it’s just a plain non-commercial-attribution license so as long as you don’t make money from it, and you give me a credit, the Prologue is yours to do with as you wish.)

Go, create!

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