NEW YORK – For anyone who has ever thought Charles Dickens was lurking inside his or her prose, a new website claims it can find your inner author.
The recently launched I Write Like has one simple gimmick: You paste a few paragraphs that exemplify your writing, then click “analyze” and — poof! — you get a badge telling you that you write like Stephen King or Ernest Hemingway or Chuck Palahniuk.
The site’s traffic has soared in recent days and its arrival has lit up the blogosphere. Gawker tried a transcript from one of the leaked Mel Gibson phone calls. The suggested author: Margaret Atwood.
The New Yorker found that an invitation to a birthday party was James Joycean. Many others were aghast to discover they wrote similarly to “The Da Vinci Code” scribe Dan Brown.
The New York Times tried putting in actual novels, such as “Moby-Dick.” Herman Melville, it turns out, writes less like himself than King, according to I Write Like.
Atwood, herself, tried the site only to discover she also apparently writes like King. “Who knew?” she tweeted.
Obviously, I Write Like isn’t an exact science. But simply the idea of an algorithm that can reveal traces of influence in writing has proven wildly popular.
Though the site might seem the idle dalliance of an English professor on summer break, it was created by Dmitry Chestnykh, a 27-year-old Russian software programmer currently living in Montenegro. Though he speaks English reasonably well, it’s his second language.
“I wanted it to be an educational thing and also to help people write better,” he said.
Chestnykh modeled the site on software for e-mail spam filters. This means that the site’s text analysis is largely keyword based. Even if you write in short, declarative, Hemingwayesque sentences, its your word choice that may determine your comparison.
Most writers will tell you, though, that the most telling signs of influence come from punctuation, rhythm and structure. I Write Like does account for some elements of style by things such as number of words per sentence.
Chestnykh has uploaded works by about 50 authors — three books for each, he said. That, too, explains some of its shortcomings. Melville, for example, isn’t in the system.
But Chestnykh never expected the sudden success of the site and he plans to improve its accuracy by including more books and adding a probability percentage for each result. He hopes it can eventually be profitable.
“I think that people really like to know how they write, even if it’s not accurate results,” said Chestnykh. “Still it’s fun for them.”
It’s easy to find a laugh. Obama’s Oval Office speech in June? David Foster Wallace. Lady Gaga’s lyrics to “Alejandro”? William Shakespeare.
Whatever the deficiencies of I Write Like, it does exude a love of writing and its many techniques. The site’s blog updates with inspiring quotations from writers, and Chestnykh — whose company, Coding Robots, is also working on blog editing and diary writing software — shows a love of literature. He counts Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Agatha Christie among his favorites.
“I had a typewriter when I was 6 years old,” he said. “But I’m not a published writer and I don’t think I write very good.”
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Online:

http://iwl.me/

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STOCKHOLM – Fans of the late crime novelist Stieg Larsson are getting lost in the Swedish countryside, searching for the quaint town of Hedestad featured in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”
The problem is, it doesn’t exist.
But international readers of Larsson’s best-selling Millennium crime trilogy could be excused for thinking otherwise, because most locations in the books are authentic.
Some of them include the Kaffebar cafe in Stockholm — a favorite haunt of Larsson’s fictional journalist Mikael Blomqvist — and the Kvarnen bar, where Larsson has tattooed computer hacker Lisbeth Salander spending evenings with her friends from the rock band Evil Fingers.
Both places are located on the trendy island of Sodermalm, a former working-class area with narrow streets where old wooden cottages are squeezed between 20th century stone houses.
The hilly Stockholm district — with popular bars, fashion stores and art galleries — is one of many islands that form the city center and the home of Larsson’s characters.
Blomqvist and Salander, the trilogy’s main characters, both have apartments there. Salander’s friendly first legal guardian Holger Palmgren also lived there before he was hospitalized.
Eager Millennium fans can take the Stockholm City Museum’s Larsson tour, an increasingly popular pastime for aficionados who visit the Swedish capital. Or they can venture out on their own, visiting the scenes of Blomqvist’s and Salander’s exploits with maps provided by the tourist office.
Starting with Blomqvist’s small apartment in the brown 19th century building at 1 Bellmansgatan, Millennium fans can relive the books’ plots in the real settings, while listening to the guide’s detailed descriptions.
“It is great to identify the addresses and see what the buildings look like,” said Roland Ojeda, a retired banker from San Francisco, who took the tour in June with his wife, Linda. “I think it brings it to life.”
Larsson’s books about a darker side of Sweden, where Blomqvist and Salander become involved in murder mysteries, sex trafficking scandals and a secret government department, have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.
The tour has attracted visitors from as faraway as Japan, Canada and Australia, said Eva Palmqvist, who leads the museum’s tour.
“I think a lot of people want to savor the experience, the story and the characters,” Palmqvist said. “I think they want to see this and feel the atmosphere.”
During the two-hour walk, Palmqvist guides the group past the scenic Monteliusvagen, a promenade overlooking other islands that are home to some of the more dubious characters in the book. The guide makes the point that Larsson’s good characters live in one area, while the evil ones live elsewhere.
“When Stieg Larsson started to write the story in 2001, he decided that Sodermalm, where he also lived, was to become the land of the good people,” Palmqvist says, smiling.
“Those that are not presented so nicely, they live in other parts of Stockholm, like Ostermalm, for example,” she adds, pointing to the east.
Palmqvist also points out the courthouse where Blomqvist is put on trial in the first book and the home of Salander’s second guardian, the evil Nils Bjurman, located in the northern part of Stockholm by Odenplan.
The group continues past a small Lebanese eatery on 22 Tavastgatan, which is believed to be the inspiration for Samir’s, the restaurant where Blomqvist dines several times.

From there, it’s just a short walk to Kaffebar on the wide, bustling street of Hornsgatan.

The cafe, renamed Mellqvists Kaffebar in 2008, is frequently visited by coffee-quaffing Blomqvist and was also one of Larsson’s favorite spots, before he died of a heart attack in 2004 at age 50.

“This is where Lisbeth Salander will ask Mikael for a loan so that she can go to Zurich,” Palmqvist chuckled.

The picturesque, hilly streets of Sodermalm have also inspired other writers.

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DENVER (Billboard) –
During a recent taping of the Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report,” host Stephen Colbert took Pandora founder Tim Westergren to task for the name of his Internet radio service.

“Why Pandora?” Colbert asked, reminding him that Pandora’s box from Greek mythology released evil into the world. “Is that what the Internet is? You click open the box and evil comes out your speakers?”

“Surprises come out,” Westergren responded, “and at the bottom of that box was hope.”

To be sure, Pandora is full of surprises and hope. For almost 10 years, Pandora operated on the verge of collapse. In the early years, while it labored to build the Music Genome Project that powers its music recommendation engine, Pandora struggled to find both a business model and funding, to the point where it had to ask employees to work without pay for almost two years.

Then came the infamous March 2007 Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision that raised the performance royalty rates for Internet radio to a degree that Westergren said would put Pandora out of business. It led to a two-year fight to reduce those rates, culminating in a compromise reached last July.

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