The blogosphere is a busy place this week for readers and those who enjoy reading-based online socialising.
Karen of Euro Crime has set up a Euro Crime news group at Friend Feed, where she posts links to reviews of and articles about British and other European crime fiction. For more explanation, see Karen's blog post. One nice aspect of Friend Feed is that readers can comment online on the links using the easy interface, so conversations can develop about the articles. You can also get the updates via email or RSS if you like, via the simple buttons provided at the Friend Feed service.
Kerrie of Mysteries in Paradise has, as usual, been very busy this week. On the day that Twitter opened up its search publicly, Kerrie (who does not hang about) set up a #crimefiction tag. So if you want to follow crime fiction conversation at Twitter, sign up to the search, and if you post on Twitter about crime fiction, use the #crimefiction tag so everyone else interested in the topic will find your pearls of wisdom. See here for Kerrie's explanation. (RSS feed for #crimefiction is here, I hope/think).
Another of Kerrie's current activities is an online collaborative crime-fiction story, whose first lines are written by best-selling author Michael Robotham. Find out about the project at Mysteries in Paradise, and join in. While you are at Kerrie's blog, you can vote on her poll. The topic changes every week, with the current question being "how often do you write a blog post?"
More memes and lists: Sunnie has reactivated the "15 books tag": name 15 books that will always stick with you, and do it within a 15-minute time frame. Sunnie's list is here; Dorte has risen to the challenge here. You might also like to list 12 events that shaped your world, or in the case of Crimefictionreader of It's a Crime, 16. Crimefictionreader, by the way, brings the excellent news that, later this month, she will be blogging the Hay festival for the BBC. Congratulations to her - I hope she isn't too introverted to undertake the task ;-). Full story is here.
A final note: I recently discovered a blog I like a lot. Called Based on Books, it posts reviews of films that are, er, based on books, and compares the two. There's a nice box in each post, summarising the key differences and providing a rating for the adaptation. Here, for example, is Kathleen Walsh's analysis of Prince Caspian. Even though I haven't seen (and probably won't see) the movie, I very much enjoyed the "book vs film" review of a book in a series that I loved very much as a child. Other posts on this blog have been similarly top-notch.
Thanks for all the great links. Friend Feed is neat!
Posted by: Gavin | 03 May 2009 at 16:20
Thanks for links, Maxine. I hope you're having a good bank holiday weekend.
Great that Gav has found friend feed!
Posted by: crimeficreader | 03 May 2009 at 20:57