From Reality to Another ("Todellisuudesta Toiseen") - a 143 page novel co-authored by Twitter contributors

I had the great pleasure of speaking at the annual MindTrek event in Tampere Finland. I have many stories I have to tell from the event, including the wonderful keynote delivered by my close friend and former colleague from my Nokia days, Lauri Kivinen - who has a few months ago left Nokia's top management to take over the job of CEO of the Finnish national broadcast company, Yle (Yleisradio) - which is kind of like the BBC of Finland, they run 4 TV channels and many radio channels and of course do the full digital suite of services that a modern broadcaster would do in an advanced member nation of the information society. Lauri's presentation was very revealing and insightful and I will blog about it separately when I get a moment.

But what I have to celebrate today, is a true world's first moment. The MindTrek event likes to surprise its audience with world's first types of digital innovations (and they had several awards ceremonies of major Finnish and international digital industry awards as well). The event that is a major milestone for all who share our 'Communities Dominate' philosophy, is the print publication of the world's first full novel (ie book) that was completely co-authored by volunteers on Twitter.

The 143 page book, entitled 'Todellisuudesta Toiseen' (From Reality to Another) was edited and put together by a team of collaborators Esa Nikkila, Ville Haaraoja, Antti Vuento, Einari Stylman, Sauli Rusanen and Mikko Karppi. The actual story comprises of 1016 individual tweets by 39 Twitter members (out of a total submission set of 2,455  tweets) and obviously the whole book is in Finnish, so it doesn't really help me to quote parts of it here, haha.

So first, as a fellow author, my great congratulations to Esa, Ville, Antti, Einari, Sauli and Mikko! A first novel is a major milestone in any aspiring author's writing career, and I share in your delight of seeing your project finally in a finished printed book and wholeheartedly congratulate the team (as well as all Twitter contributors who sent material to the book)

Secondly, being now a massively addicted Twitter users - this is ultracool as a Twitter phenomenon, and I hope it will get the deserved attention in Twitter - and the concept is rapidly adopted in other languages and on other social networks too.

And from Alan and me representing the 'Communities Dominate' mindset, my best thanks and best wishes, this is yet another case of evidence that nobody is as clever as everybody, as Alan so aptly puts it - this (meaning user-generated content ie social networking) is the 'defining aspect of humanity for the next 20 years' as Google CEO Eric Schmidt says. You have produced a commercial literary contribution, in a legacy mass media channel (print) while using one of the newest and youngest members of the social networking digital media space, Twitter. Brilliant!

Anyone please do mention this milestone at your blogs, Twitter feeds, news stories etc. I do think this is one pioneer in what will become a very 'normal' way of collaborating among authors in the very near future. And once again Finland gave us another commercial use of social networking. Wonderful. This alone, made the whole trip to MindTrek worth the long haul travel and I have many more stories to tell about the event as well.  (Did I ever say I love my job?)

Comments

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Hi Tomi,

another book based on tweets has been published in Romania this summer. There were 127 authors with 1105 tweets who shared their first internet experiences. The book was sponsored by Microsoft, so it was for free and is in Romanian, but if you are curious I can send you a link to browse the digital version. It is not a commercial book like the one you mentioned in this post, however it was a nice PR exercise done by Microsoft to launch IE8 in Romania using the power of Twitter.

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A word of caution: As far as English language Twitter novels go, this is new territory. Based on early results, as compiled by ReadWriteWeb, there have not been any success stories. RWW never spelled out what would be defined as a success, but I took their comments to assume no Twitter novelists have crossed into the mainstream or made money. It may be only a matter of time before this changes.
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