

PenFM: Fall back in love with writing via your terrible friends - edwardog
http://www.indiegogo.com/penfm?a=1665689

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shelf
Novel interface. Get the fanfic authors on board.

A tool like this would be perfect for school English classes or creative
writing workshops (and alumni).

As for making the rest of us plebs pick up the pen again... It's a little
harder than just giving us nice tools. Many aspiring writers (not all!) like
to hide their work away until they are absolutely certain they will get good
feedback, while this is like running around naked in the front yard.

Soundcloud has a similar 'get creating' premise and magically minimises that
fear of failure factor. I'm not sure how, but it's amazing. The line between
supportive and vicious is grey, blurry, narrow. Take care.

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oulipian
Using Ayn "Virtue of Selfishness" Rand to advertise your collaborative writing
app is like using Donald Trump to advertise hair-care products.

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fusiongyro
And I hear you can support the capitalist system by buying shirts with Che
Guevara's face on them. Or perhaps referencing equal parts Ayn Rand,
Hemmingway, Poe and Cervantes might be more of an attempt to bring to mind
famous authors rather than objectivism?

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oulipian
Sure. But it's like using a picture of a circle, a triangle, a square, and a
swastika to suggest "geometric shapes".

~~~
fusiongyro
No, it's like using a picture of a circle, a triangle, a square and a swastika
to suggest "famous shapes." And of course, Godwin's law and all that on you.

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forensic
Why would you put a swastika on your business in any situation?

Ayn Rand is for Glengary Glen Ross wannabes. Not for your typical creative
writer.

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fusiongyro
Unless Ayn Rand murdered a few million people on the side, her face is in no
way commensurate with a swastika.

~~~
forensic
Objectivism caused Goldman Sachs, Alan Greenspan, the 2008 crash, countless
corporate psychopaths... The death count is more than a few million.

GS alone is responsible for a famine.

Have you ever been to their offices? Copies of Atlas Shrugged on every desk.

Destructive ideologies that advocate fucking the poor and letting them die
definitely cause deaths.

~~~
fusiongyro
The logical convolutions you have to go through to make Ayn Rand into Hitler
are absurd. Marxism has easily killed ten times that number, many by accident,
many intentionally, yet few hold Marx personally responsible or would find his
face a repugnant symbol of death.

You're allowing your opinion of an ideology to turn it into nazism, but in so
doing you must overlook what makes nazism unique: that it does indeed advocate
murdering people simply for being different as a solution to problems—and that
it actually did murder millions of people directly. Ayn Rand did not do any of
that. At worst, she advanced a philosophy whose overzealous application by
unscrupulous people with power led to deaths. If that's enough to make you
Hitler, nearly every philosopher or novelist is, or would be if they were
simply famous enough.

In short: calm down. She's included in the image because her novels are in the
100 Most Influential List put out by some non-profit. Not because she was a
saint.

~~~
forensic
>yet few hold Marx personally responsible or would find his face a repugnant
symbol of death.

You obviously don't live in America!

By the way, telling someone to "calm down" makes you a douchebag.

And strawmen don't help either.

And let's not kid ourselves: she's in the image because someone in that
company is an Ayn Rand fan. There is no shortage of Randists among tech
people. Quite a bit fewer among literary types for obvious reasons.

~~~
fusiongyro
Yes, clearly it's a conspiracy to promulgate Objectivism, and not a simple
collection of four author's faces. The world must be so interesting to you.

~~~
forensic
Newsflash: Individuals who create stuff put their favorite things in the stuff
they create.

It says a lot about your intelligence that you immediately jump to a worldwide
conspiracy theory from a single instance of a single individual putting his
personal favorite author in a logo for a writing website.

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CKKim
I just watched the video. It shows a few people typing with each other online
(in this case working together on a collaborative story), a picture being
dropped down near the end, and then it being posted to Facebook.

I understand that the product is the software that allows them to do this but
it's not clear to me what unique features are being offered that make it
superior to the IM programs and forums people have already been writing
collaboratively on for years. What am I missing?

~~~
neoveller
Yeah, the video was designed in a way to capture the experience rather than
the tech. What isn't fully exposed:

\- what you see is what you get. whenever you want, you can download the story
in epub, mobi, or pdf format. while you might have to pay initially, you keep
the story itself for any future download at each stage of its development in
any format.

\- writing is in realtime. you can see what others write, google doc style.

\- content discovery is an enormous sell point here. you can write in gdocs
all you want, but will just anyone be able to find and read and comment on it?
we make stories accessible to the entire future pen.fm community to share and
enjoy.

\- we can update you on stories that you've subscribed to, to let you know
anything from the fact that it's updated, or the section added itself.

\- does anyone really enough shuffling back and forth between word/gdocs,
chat, and forums?

\- and more. hope that's good for now. :)

~~~
CKKim
Thanks for that, I get it better now. Writing with this isn't something that
interests me personally, but I hope it is funded because I reckon watching
other people do it in a "spectator" mode would be pretty entertaining!

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neoveller
Thanks for posting this, edwardog! Glad someone felt compelled to.

I'm the guy behind PenFM. AMA.

~~~
iamdave
Okay. Why ".FM" domain?

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neoveller
Because when you're bootstrapped and can't buy a 3 letter dotCom for $55/year,
FM doesn't look so bad. So we're working with it, and kind of playing with the
slogan "broadcast lit".

~~~
iamdave
Broadcast lit can actually work for what you're wanting to sell this as, so
I'll give you that point. But where are you looking that ended up with a
$55/yr TLD? Unless you're bootstrapping from absolutely nothing, that's an
investment worth making imo.

Not dismissing your product here, as a journalism nerd I think it's a novel
concept and approach.

~~~
neoveller
Indeed I am bootstrapping from basically nothing. I have this horrible
tendency to leave a job right when I have just a few months of runway. It
really puts my feet to the fire :)

pen.com is going to fet a pretty penny, I imagine in the higher 10,000s if not
more. With funding, it becomes feasible. And to correct myself, FM domains
cost $79/year not 55, so that's where I am. Got lucky in finding the short
name.

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jasondenizac
Not all of my friends are terrible, though - so I'm somewhat conflicted.

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neoveller
[http://www.pen.fm/read/A-Chance-Autumn-Encounter-
PNefec68b4f...](http://www.pen.fm/read/A-Chance-Autumn-Encounter-
PNefec68b4f051c443)

Demo of our reading experience

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adiM
Darn, for a moment I thought that this was a site that encourages people to
write with a real pen: fall __back __in love (PenFM).

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leisun
This is really popular in China ;-)

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etherextraction
Other then the export features to epub, how is this different then just using
google docs?

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neoveller
For one, google docs has a free-form dynamic that doesn't really prevent
people from cannibalizing each other's work. PenFM, like its predecessor
Neovella, enforces a turn-based writing collaboration. But that's entirely
just in terms of how it differs from GDocs in the sense of sharing the
production of content.

Collaboration in PenFM happens in another, more powerful way: the ability to
react to parts of a story with simple likes and more thorough commenting.
Imagine having written a story, and now you have to send it out to friends &
peers to review and give feedback on. Would you really rather have a back-and-
forth over IM, constantly having to find the part they're referring to? On
PenFM, they just click the section, type a comment, and you get notified to go
take a look at what they wrote. It's asynchronous.

~~~
iamdave
_For one, google docs has a free-form dynamic that doesn't really prevent
people from cannibalizing each other's work._

Not sure what you mean by "prevent people from cannibalizing each other's
work", given you can very easily share docs and disable edit features at the
user and group level but still allow people to read changes as they happen

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jeswin
I have a similar project called "Social Typist".
<https://github.com/jeswin/socialtypist>

Definitely something worth exploring. Best of luck.

Edit: last line.

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ChristianMarks
An online writers' workshop--not the same as Google Docs. There are online
subscription systems that support such activities, such as
<http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/> Getting decent feedback is a problem.
Perhaps there is a workable system that would compensate good reviewers. Most
writers aren't rich, but they might be willing to pay other writers (who
aren't rich) to review their work.

~~~
acabal
My website, Scribophile, has been doing this successfully for about 5 years
now. It looks like it's solving a different problem than pen.fm though. While
Scribophile concentrates entirely on craft and workshopping, it looks like
pen.fm is more of a marketing/publishing/writing platform.

