When I went to Philadelphia on Sunday, I was very excited -- and a bit nervous. Why?

There is a novel in Philadelphia.

I was going to photograph it.

In July, someone got picked up by the police for photographing this novel.

I saw another sticker on the University of Pennsylvania campus.

Unlike most novels, Implementation doesn't exist in a book. Rather, it exists on hundreds of stickers around Philadelphia. Looking for the novel has made my trip to Philadelphia more exciting.

Implementation is very relevant to hypertext writing -- thinking about it helps me think about how I could better create hypertext systems.

Although all the text is written by the two authors, the novel itself is up to three groups of people. The ultimate authors are those who print the stickers and put them up all over the city. They can author whatever experience they want. But even they can't determine the final structure. That is up to the reader. A reader may encounter just one paragraph, or a reader could make a conscious effort to read the entire set of stickers. The novel requires reader interaction in the writing process, for the reader has to find the stickers and construct the connections of meaning between them.

The final authors (deauthors?), I suppose, are the sanitation people who take down the stickers. I do feel a little bad for them -- there's enough residue in the city already.

Is it a good novel? To answer that, I'm going to pull a phrase completely out of context from Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The novel...

This novel isn't something to I'd recommend reading for content, but for the idea -- the Implementation.