Neal Stephenson has been thinking about similar things for a while... as a matter of fact he launched a wiki for the Baroque Cycle that sort of went nowhere. L

Neal Stephenson has been thinking about similar things for a while... as a matter of fact he launched a wiki for the Baroque Cycle that sort of went nowhere. Like one of the earlier commentors, I'm not much for anything involving tweets and earning badges, but I think Neal is experimenting around in important unmet need: Fans want to interact with their favorite authors. For a variety of reasons (eats up all your time, fan are boring and repetitive, authors are sometimes solitary introverts, etc.), authors don't have a (profitable, enjoyable) model of how to have these interactions. Fans create their own fan sites (including fanfic), but the interaction with the author and the monetization aren't there. So a new model is called for. This is an experiment toward finding this new model. (Chuck Palahniuk is also experimenting in this direction in interesting ways with writing workshops.)