This piece released by wire service AP quotes me extensively about ChatRoulette and how it fits into the rise of Peep Culture.

Here’s a sample: ‘Chatroulette is stark because it feels like television. It’s like sitting in front of the TV flipping channels, except the people are real,’ says Hal Niedzviecki, author of ‘The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors.’

It appeared in the New York Times, The LA Times and a hundred or so other places!

Here’s the archive audio file of me discussing Peep Culture and taking calls on Wisconsin Public Radio. 

Hey everyone, I’ll be discussing Peep Culture and taking calls on Wisconsin Public Radio today at 11 am est. Listen in online at http://www.wpr.org/

Here’s a piece inspired by the Toronto City Councillor who had his private text messages made public by a scorned university student ex-lover who wasn’t too happy when he started running for mayor with his live-in girlfriend by his side. Anyway, I am quoted in the piece, which does a decent job of starting to look at the implications of everything we send getting permanently stored on some gadget somewhere.

Wow, with just the weekend to go for voting, it’s Abel’s story of drugs and an angry man-bear at 51% and Dupcak’s tale of drugs, sex and performance art at 49%. What a round! North America’s no-holds-barred short story contest continues! Go read the stories and vote right now at the Broken Pencil Indie Writers Deathmatch!

Broken Pencil Magazine’s Indie Writers Deathmatch is in full swing with two stories in heated competition with each other. This is the innovative online writing competition fight to the finish brought to you by Broken Pencil: the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts! Check it here out right now! I’m the moderator for the first round!

http://www.brokenpencil.com/deathmatch/

I was on CBC Radio’s The Current this morning. You can download the podcast here.

I discussed/argued the e-book with journalist Noah Richler and David Kent, President of HarperCollins Canada. It was pretty entertaining. I was coming at it from the perspective of a writer, particularly one without the benefit at this current point in time of a publishing deal with a multinational corporate-owned publisher. (Interestingly enough, the producer who contacted me told me she was having trouble finding a writer willing to talk about e-books and publishing…)

So my take on it: small presses and independents are shut out of the chain bookstores that comprise the majority of the marketplace. Furthermore, even those writers who are published by a big company are finding themselves marginalized if they can’t generate significant sales. From that point of view, the e-book can only help writers who won’t find their books stacked up at Indigo or Barnes & Noble anytime soon. 

Obviously this is a complicated and divisive issue but I think the situation is relatively dire in terms of access — there are 10,000 plus books published every year in Canada alone, but how many of them will you see browsing through your Superstore? I think the ebook will benefit independents and small presses, and those writers who are increasingly finding for-profit publishing a difficult fit for what they want to achieve. And what about books that fall out of print in a shockingly short amount of time? Things can only get better for writers in terms of ongoing sustained access to the marketplace.

Hey everyone, the magazine I publish, Broken Pencil, runs an annual short story contest called Indie Writers Deathmatch. It’s super fun and crazy. The top 8 stories as picked by the BP editors battle against each other in our online arena. The top three stories get published in the magazine and get cash and prizes. We’ve extended the deadline to January 10, 2010. So enter now!