Breakfast at Mama's, and Some Photos

I had a free day, one day after the Books in Browsers conference concluded. I spent it having breakfast with my hosts at downtown San Francisco (three of the four housemates - Akshita stayed in because she had a meeting at Stanford later in the day). So we drove down - Xiao Chen had discovered this 4.5 star breakfast place on Yelp called Mama's and she chucked the address into the GPS and off we went.

The queue - true to form, as I later found out - was an hour long. Outside. In the cold.


(Those two ahpeks you see in the foreground? They were British, and as they walked by one said to another: "Boy, this place must be popular, ae?" in this Brit accent - which is very refreshing to hear, in California.)

So in the end Rollen and I decided to let Jenson and Xiao Chen wait it out in the queue, while we explored the surrounding neighbourhood. I wanted to photograph the roads. (Rollen was glad for an excuse to walk). We decided to get coffee for the other two, and stopped a lady crossing the street with a tray of coffee cups under her arm.

"Where'd you get the coffee, ma'am?" I asked.

"Oh - there's this place called Greco's. They have the best coffee in the neighbourhood, in my opinion. It's down the street, two and a half blocks down, look for the illy umbrellas out on the patio."

"What do you mean by ... good?" Rollen asked.

"Well I think -" and she paused, looking off into the distance, "this is my take, mind; but the coffee there tastes exactly like the coffee I had while I was in Europe. Love it. Only place I'd ever buy coffee, from around here."


I got a mocha for me and Xiao Chen, and a latte for Jenson. When we got back the queue was just as long, and they were in the middle of it.

"I think you should go figure out what you want for your order." Xiao Chen said, as she lifted her mocha off the cardboard tray.

I took photos of the dogs in the queue, and then stopped a lady in an overcoat leaving the restaurant -

"Was the food good, ma'am?"

"Ooh, you're in for a treat! Yes, it's good. Very, very good. First time here?"

"Yeah - from Singapore, and it's my last day in San Francisco today -"

"Right. These guys are famous for their french toast, so you'll be wanting the monte cristo, if you don't mind spending extra, that is ..."

"What's that?"

"Ahh - french toast and ham and cheese. A bit on the pricey side, but worth every penny!"


She wasn't kidding. I ordered the monte cristo, and we all agreed it was the best of four orders. The sandwiches are dipped into egg and grilled shut, and on the inside you get turkey, ham, and cheddar and havarti cheeses.


Served with grilled potatoes, orange and strawberry slices and homemade (really, in this case!) cranberry jam.

Rollen had the Sampler:


Which was banana bread french toast and fruit (he didn't like it). Xiao Chen and Jenson had crab benedict and shrimp benedict respectively:


We spent some time traipsing around the rest of the city that day - I'm surprised as to how steep some of the streets are in San Francisco, and how normal it seemed to the residents there.


It is, apparently, perfectly normal to find a 30-40 degree incline in downtown SF. Imagine biking (or skateboarding!) down one of those slopes!


And then there was Market Street, the posh financial district in downtown SF:


I took most of these on my first day in the city, because I had to buy an AT&T sim card and there weren't any at Ocean Avenue. So I took a BART down and wandered about, asking for directions.


San Francisco was ... an interesting place. But I arrived in Singapore this morning, and am glad to be back.

Pandamian: A Publishing Support Layer

This is the full text of a speech I gave at Books in Browsers, a technical meeting for people currently changing the future of books. The meeting was between the 21st and the 22nd of October, and was organized and held at the Internet Archive.

Hi, my name is Eli and I’m here to talk to you about what we’re doing at Pandamian. More importantly, I want to give you an idea - or some intuition, perhaps, about the problem space in which Pandamian exists.

But before that, two things:

First, there was quite a bit of talk at BiB yesterday about how young people don’t care about their privacy. Well, I am a young person - possibly the youngest person in this room - and I care so much about my privacy that I’m speaking to you under a pseudonym. So … make of that what you will.

Second, I promised my folks back home that I’d thank the people who made it possible for me to be here. I am a second year Computer Science student at the National University of Singapore, and that means that I am on a student budget. The only reason I can be here is because of the kindness of a couple of people. So I’d like to thank Brewster Kahle, who kindly subsidized part of my flight. And my school, the School of Computing. And last, but not least, the awesome, awesome people over at the Singaporean Hackerspace, who donated to my trip - you can see their logo behind me - I promised that I’d wear their shirt and do this before my talk.

Anyway, back to what I want to speak to you about. I don’t have much time to do this, so I’m going to split my talk into three bits. First, I want to talk about the problem space to which Pandamian is a solution. Then I’ll spend 2-3 minutes on Pandamian - just a little while; I promise you that it won’t be a plug. Last, I want to talk about why I think it’s important to do what Pandamian is currently doing. And why I think more people should do it.

Web Fiction
So here’s the context: I’m coming from this place called web fiction. What web fiction is is that it’s this simple idea - not a particularly new idea, because I know a group of writers who’ve been doing this since 1997. Also not a particularly original idea. But it is a simple idea, and that idea is that you take some fiction - a novel, for instance, and you put that online. You post one chapter a week, there are reader comments, and all this happens on a blog-like website, or a blog-powered website, or - if the writer is not a particularly good programmer or designer, which is very often - sometimes on an actual blog. Which can be bad.

Where I come from in this space is that I wrote a web fiction thing 5 years ago. And at the end of that year I realized that I really didn’t know what I was doing. Nobody knew what they were doing. There were no ‘best practices’.

And there are several interesting problems there. For instance: what’s the best way to design fiction in the browser, when the browser is an inherently distractive container? Also: where do you find readers? How should you talk to readers? How long should your chapters be? How many times a week should you update your story? These are all interesting questions, and nobody knew how to solve them.

So what I did was I started this blog called Novelr, and what Novelr does is that it collates and kind of collects the best ideas as solutions to these problems. And we’ve got four years worth of experience now on how to do this - we know, more or less, what works or doesn’t work when you’re presenting fiction on a webpage, in this interactive web format.

And it’s not just me. I sometimes do experiments myself, but these ideas aren’t just from me. Sometime over the last four years of Novelr’s existence a community of writers condensed around the blog. So now I approach these writers whenever they discover a new technique, or hack, or trick to write better web fiction, and I ask them to share it with the rest of the community. Or they come to me and say: ‘I’ve discovered this, I want to share it with everyone, may I do a guest post?’ Which is cool.

But now we come to an interesting question we must ask, don’t we? Why do these people do web fiction?

You have to remember that when I said web fiction a minute ago, most of you were probably thinking about fan fiction. Which is a stigma, and is possibly the standard of rubbish in the publishing industry. And there’s also the fact that - for the longest time - publishers would not publish anything that’s available for free on the Internet. Dominique tells me this is no longer true, but for the longest time this was the policy, and the conventional wisdom was that if you were serious about your work you wouldn’t put anything, at all, online.

So there must be some compelling reason to have these writers do web fiction. Because it would seem as if doing web fiction was equivalent to shooting their career in the proverbial foot. And the web fiction community has been growing in the past four years. And the rate of that growth has been increasing. So ... why?

It turns out that a member of the community did a survey two or three months ago, and it confirmed several suspicions I had about why these writers were doing what they were doing.

There are two primary reasons to do web fiction.

The first reason is that these writers are … well, writers. They love writing. They’re already writing anyway. And it’s likely that they have paper manuscripts in their drawers, or cupboards, gathering dust, as they do what they love. What putting their fiction on the Internet does for them is that it gives them an external motivation to keep writing. I’m not sure about you, but I find that when I blog, I write more consistently and more often than if I were to write an essay on paper to figure things out. And as it is true for me, and for bloggers, so it is true for these writers.

The second reason is the more important one. What these writers experience - well I want you to imagine this. Imagine that you’re a writer, and you’ve just finished writing a chapter and you put that online. Now what happens is that a couple of hours after this - if your web fiction is good; or if it’s one of the more established ones - you get readers arguing in your comments. And they say things like: “Oh, I don’t like this character!” or “Oh, I don’t like that character” or “Oh I think this character is going to backstab that character!” and so on so forth.

Now this is incredibly fulfilling for a writer to have. Powerfully fulfilling. I’ve had traditionally published writers come to me for advice on how to do this, and I point them to multiple sources, and they tell me: “Oh no, I’m just doing this for a hobby.” And then, a couple of months later, I go to their blogs or they email me, saying “Oh my God. Oh my God. I can’t imagine doing this any other way now. Why didn’t I do this earlier?!”

And I’ve also had writers - and there are many in the web fiction community - who started this web fiction thing because they wanted to get published; they were aspiring authors. And now they no longer want to get published. Because they’re having these amazing, joyous, fulfilling writing experiences.

Now this is an indicator that writers don’t really want to get published. What they really want is these amazing, fulfilling reader interactions. The kind of interaction that’s similar to: you’re a writer, and you’re walking down a street, and a reader comes up to you and says: “Oh my God, I just read your book yesterday, it was amazing! It changed my life! Thank you!” - that’s what writers really want. And for the longest time getting published - traditionally - was a means to that end. If you give writers an alternative to this that is less painful, simpler, instantly gratifying - by gum, they will jump on it.

This is also, perhaps, a signal that web fiction - or whatever it’s going to be called - will be a significant part of the book future.

Now there’s another question to ask. If the reasons for doing web fiction are so compelling, why aren’t more writers doing it, as opposed to eBooks and such?

I have two suspicions as to why. No data here - just suspicions. The first is that eBooks are big today because of what Apple’s doing and what Amazon’s doing. So there’s a lot of attention there and that’s where writers are turning to. That’s just good PR.

But the second reason is: this technology is hard. It’s hard! Most writers are terrible programmers, terrible designers. And over the past two years, as the community’s rate of growth has increased, I began to grow sick of writers contacting me to complain, or to ask for technical help to design their blogs, their sites, to make them readable and ready for web fiction and such. I began to grow tired of being tech support.

So that’s how Pandamian got started. I’m doing it with two friends - Joash and Yipeng, and we’ve been doing it for half a year now, though we wrote code for maybe the last three months.

Pandamian
What Pandamian is is that it’s a Wordpress.com for writers. It’s a CMS, just a CMS, but the design is done; the backend interface is simple. Essentially everything we’ve learnt over the past four years on how to make fiction readable in the browser will be incorporated into the design.

And the eventual aim for what we want is to have one-click ebook conversion to any ebook format you want; one-click ‘create an ebook store to sell books on your site’; one-click push to ebook distribution channels like the Kindle store or Smashwords, or whatever.

We really want to make this simple. And by simple I mean that not only can some 16 year old kid can use this, but also my 60 year old grandfather, if he so decides to write his memoir.

That means a couple of things. Plugins? … no. Wordpress? … no. My grandfather is not going to understand Wordpress’s interface. There are too many elements. Most of them aren’t needed, and it’s incredibly confusing. When you log into Pandamian the first thing you see is this:



And that’s it. It’s WRITE, REVISE, RESPOND, CUSTOMIZE (and SETTINGS) and as we add features we’re going to slot it all into this. I’m sorry I can’t show you the software right now; I don’t have enough time.

So that’s Pandamian. But now I want to go into the last bit of my talk.

Make Technology Boring
Why are we so interested in making things simple? Why are we so passionate about making things simple? That’s an important question to ask.

What I believe in - and this is the crux of my talk; this is the idea that I really want to push here - what I believe is that you can only change the world if the technology is boring.

Take blogging, for instance. Blogging has changed the way we read news, it has changed the way we share ideas and opinions. But blogging the social phenomenon only happened when blogging the technology became boring, and trivial.

It is trivial today to create a blog - you go to Blogger.com or Wordpress.com and you can get a blog up and running in a couple of seconds. It is equally trivial to subscribe to a blog, or to create an RSS feed from a set of blog posts. This wasn’t always true. In the early days of the Internet you had to be able to program - to write CGI scripts - if you wanted to create a dynamic website. And the permutations of blogs that exist today only happened when blogging - the technology - became boring.

And so it is with publishing. It is not easy to publish a book, online, today. It is not easy to do up an ePub. We've had lots of talk about new standards and such at BiB over the past day or so. But that's useless to a 60 year old grandpa. He can't use it because it's too hard to use, even if it's easy and boring for us programmers to do. But if we can make the technology to publish boring enough that anyone can write digitally, cool things will happen. Which is kind of what we’re doing at Pandamian: on one level we’re working to solve these pain points that Novelr’s community currently has. But on another level we’re trying to make the technology boring.

The end goal, of course, is to make writing online the first option for writers looking to get published. No longer is it: write, push to agent, look for publishers. No. This shouldn’t be the way to do things. It should be: write online, get a reader base around your fiction, experience this amazing, fulfilling writing experience, and then look for agent, look for publisher.

Because if that happens, and writing online becomes the norm; the first step to getting published, then all sorts of cool things can and will happen. Really I think two things will happen.

First, we’d enable the creation of newer, cooler publishing startups. Think about Twitter. Twitter as we know it today was only possible when blogging became widespread. Without blogging we wouldn’t have that model of thinking about updates that Twitter currently has; that Twitter has borrowed. And now imagine the kinds of publishing startups that will be possible if and when writing online becomes a norm.

Second, if you have writers opting to move online as a first choice, rather than as an alternative - you will enable publishers to do cool things. And by that I mean you’ll force publishers to do cool things. And I plan to do this. In fact I was probably invited to speak here on the basis of an essay I wrote, with the weird title: ‘To Change Publishing, Make Publishers Obsolete.’

What I mean by that is - when what you’re doing becomes a threat to their model, publishers would be forced to innovate in this space. To their eventual benefit, I think.

So what are some of the things publishers can do? I have several ideas. Maybe publishers may now choose which authors to publish from online filters. Either they build the filters or some third party builds the filters, but if the majority of writing is online - that’s just data, right? You can now figure out which are the most popular series, what geographical locations are certain kinds of content popular, which market segment of your audience and so on - and use that to decide which author to publish. Which is better than the arbitrary process of publishing writers from agent submissions and old boy networks.

Maybe - just maybe - you can have aggregated notes, or shared reading experiences. Because all this is in HTML, right? And it’s networked, and open. And that makes these kinds of things possible.

And maybe citations in the future will be possible - and you can link not only to an actual page, but also to actual paragraphs. Because this is a website, and it’s just HTML and anchor text.

And these are not just my ideas, by the way. These are originally Craig Mod’s ideas - and he’s sitting over there. And that thing about filters? Richard Nash is doing a filter; Cursor is essentially a filter.

Of course, some of these ideas are all pie-in-the-sky. But my point isn’t that these ideas will happen, it is that it’s only possible if we make the technology boring.

So where does this leave us? I’ll tell you where this leaves me. For the longest time we were thinking about what is it exactly that we do at Pandamian. We called ourselves a ‘Digital Publishing House.’ I realized on the way here that we’re not a digital publishing house. We’re not publishing anyone, per se. And if you’ve read the title of this talk, or if you have my card (and the tagline there - ‘Writers are The New Publishers’) you’ll see that this is true. We’re not a digital publishing house. We’re a publishing support layer. We make the technology boring, so that writers - and maybe publishers, if they want it - can take part in this shift to the web.

I should close now. And I’ll close by saying that: I am young. My two co-founders, Yipeng - from Computer Science, and Joash, our Business guy: they’re 2, 3 years older than I am. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.

Am I scared? Yes, I am. I’ve seen the statistics, I know that 9 out of 10 startups will fail. But I’m sick and tired of waiting for a big company to come and change this, to come and solve these pain points. I’ve been waiting for a very long time.

And so this is probably what I'm going to do for the next couple of years. We'll have to work hard on it for quite a bit. I want to make the technology boring, and to perhaps - in this manner - change the world. Thank you very much.

San Francisco Thoughts Day 1 & 2

Just a couple of quick, disconnected thoughts about SF:

1) Am bunking with four NUS students in the city. Two girls and two guys. They have a small apartment along Ocean Avenue - good location, great sofa, not too far from food. No ocean, though.

2) Suburban America is ugly. Butt ugly. I kid you not ugly. Houses are wooden and old-looking and built higgly-piggly over the hills. So where I'm staying is this grid-network of streets that are filled with houses, in clashing colours and the neighbourhood is a wee bit dodgy - Xiao Chen says that once she saw a random guy handing out pot on the street.

3) That picture I took above is not representative of the city; I just thought it was funny. (Though, yeah it's kinda representative of the neighborhood). My friends tell me there are nicer places in SF - Palo Alto, for instance, and the central areas itself nearer to Fisherman's Wharf. I agree - I've been to Montgomery Street to buy my American number, and the place was beautiful. More pictures when I can get back to my camera cable.

4) It's chilly. Lowest temperature is at 12 degrees celsius. Am wearing hoodies and beanies and jackets. Not all together, of course.

5) I'm surprised at the extent I've been spoiled by Singapore - the first train station I got off at SF I saw a black guy leap over the turnstile and run (the station operator didn't see him) and my first thought was: 'God, that'll never happen in SG!' And then a couple of minutes later two guys in civilian clothes walked through an emergency exit and waved a badge to the station operator, and nobody else stared because police were normal, and this was normal.

Badge was probably FBI though, but I couldn't be sure.

6) American food portions are huge. Jonathan tells me it's normal for people to pack the leftovers and bring them in for their next meal.

7) Also, American coins are weird. They come in denominations of 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 and a dollar. AND THEY DON'T SAY 25 THEY SAY A QUARTER wtfiwasscanningfornumbersdammit!

7) Americans don't understand Asian names - I got called Mr Wang by the guy at the AT&T store, after he registered me under the very last word in my name. Go figure. I am now registered under a slang word for penis. I am so Hung about it. Like what a Dick, right?

8) I need to sleep now. Event's tomorrow and I need to be alert. Goodnight, all.

San Francisco

A couple of things:

1) I'll be speaking at a conference in San Francisco next week. It's called Books in Browsers, organized by the Internet Archive, and is essentially a technical meeting for people currently working on the future of the book. Am subsidized by Brewster Kahle (founder of Alexa Internet and the IA), the NUS School of Computing, and the awesome people over at Hackerspace.sg.

I'll be talking about Pandamian, this little startup thing I'm doing. The underlying agenda for BiB is to consolidate efforts in the web-based publishing sphere. I suspect, too, that the IA is going to be pushing its standard for distributing book-catalog metadata: it's called OPDS, is open-source, and will be a fairly important first-step in standardizing the way books are consumed in the future.

In simple terms: what happens there is likely to change the future of reading, and so I'm rather excited to be a part of it.

2) Yes, I'm doing a startup; have been working on it for 6 months now. I'm still debating for/against writing about it on Mochaspot, because I've always kept work separate from this blog. But then again Pandamian is beginning to define my life. So we'll have to see.

3) And I'm swamped with schoolwork. Am a little worried about my math at the moment, will probably be bringing some assignments/homework to do on the plane along with me. Hope I'll survive the rest of the semester, there're only 4 weeks left!

PS: Thank God funding was possible! And I suppose I should talk a little about the journey, in a bit. But yes: I am thankful, and yes, I am in debt to so many kind people who made this possible. Thank you all.

PPS: Woohoo Paul, who's Yayasan Sarawak Champion!

MSN

I remember waiting for Friday nights, waiting for the sweet-spot, just after eight, and then I'd fire up my old Windows ME computer and log onto MSN. Because it seemed as if everyone in Kuching were online on Friday nights. And there'd be these huge group conversations, dozens and dozens of people all crammed into one window, and you had no idea who was talking to who, a mess of emoticons and teenagers and LOLs and OMFGs. It was terrible. You met new people that way. New girls, mostly. Terrible way to meet girls, or new people, or even strangers who saw your username and clicked add and went to your blog. But I loved it.

I remember sneaking online on the desktop computer, Windows XP now, blue and green light pooling into the darkness of my study room.And this was the new house - the current house - and like so many other times I found myself banned from going online. Because I had no self control. And so the times that I could go online I spent switching between MSN and talking to friends, and posting in the Undergroundsquare forums. I appeared offline in these secret periods.

I remember talking to friends late into the night. We had this theory that people were different on the Internet. Friends became odd variations of themselves in the container of a chat window. Maybe the personas were fake. Or maybe they were hidden facets of their personalities, rarely seen in real life. I had to wrap my head around that idea. And I subscribed to the second theory: it was exciting to think you were seeing bits of your friends that you've never been able to see before.

I remember 2am conversations and waiting, waiting for the right person to appear online. Because over time MSN became like that: wait offline, invisible, until the right person pops in, and then you emerge from the cellar of your contact list, eager to chat. MSN was morphing into this distracting thing. We were growing up. We learned to dump most of our crazy emotes. We began to be selective with who we talked to.

I've not logged into MSN for a full year now. Most of the time I'm really busy. Most of the time I can't remember half of the people in my contact list. (And I realize it's not called MSN anymore - it's Windows Live Messenger, or something similar - but my friends and I, we can't be bothered).

I sometimes wonder if there are kids out there, 15 years old with curfews and desktop computers, who dream of Friday nights so they can get online and chat. Because, to them, the whole of Kuching goes online to chat on Friday nights.

I wonder if that slice of Internet still exists. Because it would be sad if it didn't. They wouldn't have known what they've missed.