I just posted this to Hackers Party Kickstarter, so apologies to the 10 of you who backed both projects -- you can ignore this. :)

For the 73 other of you: in case you haven't heard, the Internet is being threatened by a piece of legislation called as SOPA. The bill is being marked up in Congress and might be voted on on Wednesday the 21st. If you've been ignoring all the SOPA news, please  take a moment to read up on it. You can start here or on Wikipedia.

The gist of SOPA is that it will give the content industry unprecedented control over black-listing websites they claim are hosting infringing content. There will be no takedowns, no arbitration, and no oversight. If SOPA were law when YouTube launched, they would have had their DNS records yanked and the site would never have grown into the platform it is today. While the MPAA and RIAA claim sites like YouTube and Twitter won't be targeted by legislation like SOPA, they're lying. SOPA will be abused, just like the DMCA is being abused today -- except this time the effects will be much much worse.

So please, take the time to call your political representatives and tell them to vote against SOPA. 

On Friday I launched my third Kickstarter project:

█ ██████ SOPA ███ ███ █ ███ ███ ████ STUPID T-SHIRT

Check out the project here and buy a shirt if you'd like to support the cause. I'm hoping to ship them in February 2012.

In case you want to order another copy, order them here:

http://www.emojidick.com/

Thanks again for all your support,

Fred

7:30pm,
Fish Bar, East Village
237 East 5th Street, b/w 2nd and 3rd
http://maps.google.com/maps/place...

For everyone that RSVP (and prepaid for a book), I'll have them for you!

See you tomorrow,

F

Hi Everyone,
So I decided Fish Bar would be an appropriate place to have the Emoji Dick party. I have everyone's copies who responded to the Doodle Poll:

MSG
mk
Oliver
alex
Marc10
Songul Aslanturk
nbs
AndyM
Noneck
Martin

But RSVP here in the comments if you want a copy and can make it to the party. I'll order your copy and try to get it delivered by then. Here are the details:

Emoji Dick Party
7:30pm
Friday, August 20th, 2010
Fish Bar
237 E. 5th St.
b/w 2nd and 3rd
http://maps.google.com/maps/place...

Feel free to bring anyone interested in Emoji, Mechanical Turk and/or Herman Melville.

Thanks,

Fred

PS: I decided to do a SXSW panel about crowdsourcing because of my work on Emoji Dick. If you're going to be in Austin April, (or even if you're not), please vote for it:

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/6333...

Hi everyone,
So Wired UK has short bit about Emoji Dick! My friend Henrik found it today and posted it to Twitter.

See below.

I'm also excited to announce that the book is basically done, with the addition of a great introduction written by arts critic Paddy Johnson of http://www.artfagcity.com & L Magazine.

The bad news is that LuLu moved the goal posts and now I have to fit the book into 740 pages, not 800. This isn't fatal, as I can probably adjust margins and font sizes, but it did set me back a bit in terms of schedule.

I'll have some time this weekend.

As for everyone waiting for their hard copies, I'm going to post the PDF as soon as I get the artist proof right. This will hopefully take only one order from LuLu, but I can't be sure. Once the PDF is sealed, I'll put in the big order for all the books, post the PDF, and then ship you your merchandise (unless you live in NYC and then I'll try and hand deliver), and get the screen prints on their way.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Fred

Hi Everyone,
So now that I'm mostly recovered from SXSW, I'm looking forward to hunkering down on Emoji Dick in the next couple of weeks. Your sentences are great and we're getting really close.

In the mean time, check out the video of me speaking at Ignite NYC on why I did the project and other fun things I've discovered about crowd sourcing

http://www.youtube.com/watch...

best,

Fred

Hi Everyone,
So I had some time today to sit down and churn the data from the votes. It went well and I actually have a script that is ready to output THE finished book. I have to say reaching the end of this project is leaving me with a complex set of emotions.

Anyway, the issue I ran into today is that LaTeX is starting to freak out and give me memory errors. Apparently it doesn't like digesting 100,000 emoji icons.

I'm beginning to think about scrapping the LaTeX -> PDF idea and just outputting into well formed HTML and CSS that looks nice and can be printed into a book. I'll have to brush up on my CSS skills, but I'm realizing there isn't one markup language that is well suited for this task.

Regardless, the votes for each sentence are tallied and the book is almost ready to go out in PDF form, so keep your eyes peeled.

Second, I just discovered via a Google News Alert on "Emoji Dick" that the book has been featured as a case study in a University of Maryland class on the future of the book:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/26087685/History-of-the-Book-syllabus

Its at the bottom of page 8.

I also just did an interview about the project with a fairly prominent magazine -- if it works out it should be some good exposure, but I don't want to jinx it so I'll let you know when the article is confirmed.

In the mean time, I hope all is well and thanks again for backing such a crazy project -- we're almost there.

Fred

Hi Everyone,
In case you didn't catch it I did a quick Emoji project that you might find humorous: I converted the New Yorker's famous Eustace Tilley cover into an Emoji Mosaic.

Here are more details:

http://fredbenenson.com/blog/2010/01/10/eustace-emoji/

The votes finished off and I'll be in the final stretch of processing all the Emoji Dick data in the next week or two. Then on to screen prints & custom emoji sentences for my backers!

F

Hi Everyone,
So as promised, here are the ~40,000 Human Intelligence Tasks that will let you vote vote and edit the book:

http://bit.ly/5EwMa8

For those of you who have financially backed the project, you'll effectively get a rebate for your efforts. For everyone else, now is your chance to make some money contributing to Emoji Dick.

Your votes will end up determining which sentences make it into the book and which don't.

Amazon is predicting the batch will be done on Monday, January 04, 2010 at 3:46 AM PST, but last time this prediction was a couple days off from its initial projection, so it'll likely take another couple of days.

Do good work and Thanks!

Fred