If you've been following any reputable news source over the last few months, you'll know nothing about the fact that I released my debut novel "The Banjo Players Must Die" into the wild armed only with a Creative Commons license in August.

A day or two ago, this novel rounded 4,000 downloads between archive.org, memoware, manybooks, and scribd.

For the first time, the truth about the monumental cock-up that is Doomsday is revealed. Centuries of sloppy research and abysmal story telling skills converge to bring you "The Banjo Players Must Die", an account of celestial incompetence and molested rodents. Oh, and a lot of boobs.

The Banjo Players Must Die!: Book coverA new novel, Creative Commons licensed, which could have been written by fifteen monekys given about two weeks with well oiled typewriters.

Celebrate the release of my first novel, if you must, by expressing outrage and indignation that the innocent term "novel" has been sullied so.

The archetypal examples of linear content are television and books (with some flexibility where genres such as Choose Your Own adventure are concerned, where there is flexibility around the progress of the plot and deterministic if multiple outcomes). Non-linear content has many examples of varying degrees of exoticness: tivo is an example of trying to reduce linearity of television broadcast, many computer games are now praised for non-linearity such as The Sims and Alpha Centauri.

The Economist (bloody expensive but the most consistently good read) has set up this site to ask people for help figuring out what TNBT is in content production. A lovely question which does get the grey matter going, but unfortunately the Terms of Use are draconian. As such, I prefer to post my neat proposition here.

Note that the ideas expressed in this post are free to use by all entities for any purpose (including but not limited to producing more intellectually stimulating toilet paper), with the exception of The Economist Group. The Economist Group will have acquired the right to employ ideas expressed herein when they have:

• Done an article on Richard Stallman, suggesting at some point that he has been consistently overlooked for a Nobel prize (bonus points for dissing his personal hygiene)
• Caused pandemonium by delivering printouts of the fark.com front page on a daily basis for one year to the doorstep of 10 Downing Street, with the top story headlined in a suitable gothic font with a few !!!111OMGLOLWTFBBQ tacked on at the end
• Revised the Big Mac index to a more accurate bundle (beer, rice, and gummy bears, people. Staple diet)

Read on. I am done with the silly bits in this post.

One evening as Chiara and I were on a Christmas shopping sprint in Udine, she got an SMS announcing a gathering of Friulano bloggers that evening for aperitivi (for you ignorant non-Italian louses, that's the name given as an excuse to drink wine before dinner). Just after seven, we met up with Il Furlanist and ordered a bottle of vino rosso corposo. The bloggers trickled in over the next half hour, and we ended up with nine persons (not counting the salami-happy canine entourage of one).

I was immediately comfortable with these people as was Chiara, people we had not met before. To my mind, the reason is clear: the Friulano bloggers are a community. I am used to communities arising around a shared interest and I thrive in them. My Linux User Group in Egypt is such a community, and the dynamics clearly map very well: bonhomie, egalitarianism, respect, informality, and the clarity of people who have set up outpost camps in the content-producing side of the media economy.