One of the reasons for the popularity of social media app Foursquare is its social gaming aspect. Accruing all those badges, beating out friends and strangers for mayorships is strangely addictive. This New York Times article talks a bit more about that:

While Foursquare has been talked about in corporate boardrooms as the next big thing in social media — it has some 2.5 million users — it has also spawned a more trivial pursuit: a petty and vicious battle over virtual pieces of turf.

Strangers are locked in bitter rivalries. Workplaces have been carved up into virtual battlefields. College campuses have become factionalized. Even some homes have become social media minefields.

Not bad for a feature that was never part of the original concept for Foursquare. Dennis Crowley, a founder, said the idea for becoming a mayor was born from a passing joke made by Chad Stoller, a friend and adviser, about the huge amount of time that Mr. Crowley and his partner, Naveen Selvadurai, were spending in a Greenwich Village cafe, hashing out their Web idea. “You two should be mayor,” Mr. Crowley recalled Mr. Stoller saying, in reference to the cafe. (Foursquare shuns the stuffy “mayoralty.”)

Indeed, Foursquare badges are so popular that the start-up has partnered with some big real-life partners to create badges (The History Channel, Zagats, Discovery). The company also has curtailed creating new badges because they’re apparently inundated with requests.

On Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, annoying as they can be, are also huge. Zynga, the company that created Farmville is valued by some at around $4-billion.

So what does this have to do with reading? While the act of reading is a personal one, what you read is a huge part of the social lives of many readers. Whether it’s keeping up with the latest instalment in a popular series, checking out the latest hipster author or finishing romance novels three at a time, many readers like to share what they’re reading.

E-readers and reading apps could easily add social gaming components easily. We’re not talking about Farmville for the literary set here, but something that could genuinely enhance the reading experience and maybe help spur sales too.

A few examples:

Goal-setting

Earlier this month Foursquare announced a partnership with Runkeeper to distribute fitness badges for running certain distances, meeting goals, etc. This could easily be applied to your reading habits. I set a goal earlier this year to read 52 books this year. Knowing there’s a social badge that exists would’ve been an extra incentive for me to stay on track. Need to read a book by the end of the month for your book club? Develop an app that sets deadlines for reading and rewards you a badge or something similar when you meet your goal.

Showing off your interests

Love fantasy novels, detective fiction or romance? What about a badge that shows off your love for these genres? Publishers could easily partner with an e-book distributor to dole out these virtual rewards. Got a series that’s taking off? Create a badge when people buy all the books in it.

Indie publishers could band together to create an “indies do it better” badge that’s given out when you buy a certain number of books from selected publishers.

A publishing house could create a badge to celebrate an anniversary, an event, etc.

Push sales

Create timed badges that are given when people buy books the first week (or month) of publication.

Spread the buzz

If you’re the Giller Prize (or the Writers Trust, or the Governor-Generals) why not create a badge every year that’s given out when someone buys one (or two, or three) of your nominated books.

Thomas Pettitt on the Gutenberg Parentheses from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

The Nieman Journalism lab has an interesting interview with Danish thinker Thomas Pettitt who argues that the internet might actually mark a return to a pre-Gutenberg society of sorts.

He posits the idea that the 15th-century to the 20th-century marked a sort of Gutenberg Parenthesis, an odd interregnum where print reigned supreme in our information culture.

Of course, prior to mass printing and literacy, information was spread more haphazardly through rumours, songs, poems, oral stories, etc. Printing changed this because books gave a solidity to facts that rumours spread orally didn’t.

From the piece:

And with regard to things like truth, or the things like the reliability of what you hear in the media, then I think, well, in a way we’re in for a bad time. Because there was a hierarchy. In the parenthesis, people like to categorize — and that includes the things they read. So the idea clearly was that in books, you have the truth. Because it was solid, it looked straight, it looked like someone very clever or someone very intelligent had made this thing, this artifact. Words, printed words — in nice, straight columns, in beautifully bound volumes — you could rely on them. That was the idea.

And then paperback books weren’t quite as reliable, and newspapers and newssheets were even less reliable. And rumors you heard in the street were the least reliable of all. You knew where you were — or you thought you knew where you were. Because the truth was that those bound books were probably no more truthful than the rumors you heard on the street, quite likely.

There are, of course, differences between 21st-century information culture and medieval Europe. Literacy and a lack of a central power (i.e. the Catholic Church) being two of them. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting idea and one that could shed a bit of light on our post-print age.

My co-worker Adam McDowell has decided to try out the caveman diet and blog about it.

He will not be chasing down woolly mammoths and grappling with sabretooth tigers. They’re not very common in downtown Toronto. I blame climate change.

From his caveman blog:

Starting Wednesday I’m undertaking a one-month experiment in adding aspects of a paleolithic man’s daily round into my 21st-century urban existence. I want to see how far I can travel in the footsteps of our Stone Age hunter-gatherer ancestors — at least in terms of the way I eat and keep fit — while making a living as a writer for theNational Post, a daily Canadian newspaper based in Toronto.

Photo from Adam’s caveman blog.

My fondness and respect for indie publisher McSweeney’s is pretty huge. They publish some of my favourite writers, do fun (and worthwhile) things like teach kids how to write and they do it all with style.

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From the post:

On the early side of the ’00s, a post-college, pre-McSweeney’s Eli Horowitz sat down in the middle of rural Virginia and stared at a pile of nails, wood, and glass. Against all odds – in particular, those stating Eli’s heretofore untested ability to build things – the items had conspired to become a house, and it was finished save for one small detail. Eli was tired, and the window trim that made sense during the home’s excitable blueprint stages seemed less important here in the wilderness, where his only neighbors were bats and foxes.

So, like any good recently graduated Philosophy major, he thought about it. What was the purpose of window trim in the Blue Ridge Mountains? No one would see it, it had no utilitarian purpose, it didn’t have feelings – nope, there was no real reason to go ahead with it. On the other hand, it would look nice. And that wound up being reason enough for Eli. From this story, a typical McSweeney’s mantra emerges. It goes: Never having done something before is a bad reason not to do it.

There you go everyone. Your mantra for 2010.

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