YouVert

550,000 People Watch A Grown Man Sing About Harry Potter

Nope, there are no spoilers in this song. But a nerdy white guy does sing about what would happen should certain things happen in the final book. He also flames the media storm and in the end condemns all those who are interested in the little scarred wizard. I guess it is a good way to get attention if you are that guy.

FanFiction Is The Old Black (read CGM), And It Also Can Get You Beat Up

In a very interesting development, Fan Fiction, some of the original UGContent on the web has been the subject of a lot of chatter recently. Until recently, Fan Fiction was primarily fan based, with no real interaction with corp America. Then Ex-Yahoo peeps stepped in and had to F it all up. They created Fanlib.com in order to aggregate all the content and offer non-payment type incentives to the authors (DVDs, Screenings, etc.). The community right away started poking holes in what they were trying to do with the site, how they were using the content and suspect of the revenue/rights and ownership question.
This is what happens when you try too hard to be something because you see money in it vs. doing something because it is a passion (not that there is anything wrong with looking for new ways for success, but some things are easier than others). Regardless, the whole thread below by Fan Fiction author Mary McNamara is very entertaining and worth a read by anyone interested in the user content space as this segment is more developed and thus more skeptical than most.

LINK: Mary McNamara's Multichannel News Initial Post
LINK 2: Her further investigation with links all over the place (READ BOTH).

Author Uses Home Appliances To Make Website

Got this from the esteemed Bardot. It is just pure, unadulterated, awesomosity.

Tell me after all this that you wont buy the book.

LINK: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Literature Mash-Up

Having lived in Brooklyn for years and been a big fan of Brooklyn writer Jonathan Lethem already, i have found a new found fondness for the scribbler. For the general public, Lethem is charging $1 in a non-exclusive license to anyone who wants to mix/remix/mash/trash-up his stories for their own purposes. Currently, the project is titled "Promiscuous Stories"

He recently did the same cutting and pasting with some other famous authors' work for a piece in Harper's and was so enchanted by it, he decided to encourage it for some of his work. True, you cannot simply take his work, change a few sentences and sell it as your own. His goal is that people will incorporate for film and stage in new ways, but still, I love the idea. It reminds me of a cross between Warhol and hip hop sampling. I am sure that it will yield some interesting results and it could be a new open source version of literary art.

LINK: Lethem's New Project

Originally seen on Boing Boing