Online Sitcom Seeks Writers

If you're a budding scriptwriter, here's an opportunity that might interest you.

Where are the Joneses? is made by Baby Cow, the TV and film production company founded by Steve Coogan. It's described as the world's first interactive daily online sitcom.

The show follows the adventures of Dawn Jones (pictured below), a young woman who finds out that her father was a sperm donor. She sets off on a trip around Europe to find her 27 siblings, but what happens in each episode is decided by contributions from the public.



The project uses the latest Wikidot technology, which allows online communities to add, remove and edit content. Suggestions for storylines or complete scripts can be uploaded to the Where are the Joneses? wiki. You can also suggest ideas for new characters, volunteer to appear in an episode yourself, or offer your house as a location. And, of course, you can help to develop ideas submitted by other people. As it says on the Baby Cow website, the possibilities are endless.

The best ideas are turned into scripts by the Baby Cow team and filmed as episodes of the comedy; a new episode appears online every day. Where are the Joneses? stars Emma Fryer and Neil Edmond.

Unfortunately there's no money on offer, but this is a good opportunity to get some scriptwriting credits for your CV/resumee. It's also an interesting chance to work collaboratively on a writing project using cutting-edge methods and technology.

A Million Penguins

...That's the title of an experiment in collaborative novel-writing currently taking place at www.amillionpenguins.com.

A Million Penguins is a joint project of the publishing house Penguin and DeMontfort University, Leicester, England.

So far the project has been running for around three weeks. From the initial sentence "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day", a substantial, if somewhat incoherent, novel is now taking shape.

Anyone interested in joining in is welcome to go along to the Million Penguins website and open an account (which is free, of course). A Million Penguins uses the wiki format that powers the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Anyone who has ever written or edited entries on Wikipedia should find the interface familiar, therefore.

Even if you're not interested in contributing, it's well worth taking a look at the project to see how it evolves. My view is that there is some good writing in there, along with a lot of poorly written nonsense. The novel has also been hijacked to some extent by one contributor who seems obsessed about bananas, and a live topic on the Million Penguins Blog is whether or not they should be banned. The novel is also lacking any overall theme or direction, though there are some promising stories embedded in it. Maybe wiki-novels are not the future of publishing, but I could see smaller wikis with membership by invitation only as an interesting possibility for future collaborations.

Anyway, do visit A Million Penguins and see what it's all about for yourself!