As well as being six sto­ries by six Pen­guin authors, We Tell Sto­ries is an ARG, designed by Six To Start, set to be launched once the six inter­ac­tive fic­tions have all been pub­lished over the coming weeks. There are, though, already some little ARGish clues pep­pered through the map text of the first story: the addresses of con­tainer com­pa­nies, promi­nent men­tions of easily-​visited places (var­i­ous rooms in the Bal­moral Hotel, Edin­burgh for exam­ple), and a ‘phone number: 020 8133 8141.

I rang, and heard this:

Hello, Alice?

I’ve made a ter­ri­ble mis­take. I need your help.

I have a story to tell you, but it will only make sense in the right place.

If you stand face to face with the statue of John Bet­je­man in St. Pan­cras sta­tion, ring this number: 020 7193 3154.

Then I’ll be able to explain more.

As luck would have it, I’ll be in St. Pan­cras Sta­tion tomor­row morning…

I love the idea of giving web­sites a phys­i­cal loca­tion of sorts, and this goes fur­ther than ser­vices like GeoURL (which is broken at the moment) by tying in weblogs with nearby resources.

Click here to view Submit Response at Mul­timap, and you can follow Richard’s instruc­tions to add your own fre­quently updated per­sonal home­page to the system.

It looks like this:

Cool, huh?

Sadly, before I got my mitts on the thing, one of its hard drives failed.

Hap­pily, it’s now all better, and coming round my house tomor­row afternoon!

For those inter­ested in read­ing about a man star­ing glee­fully at a table for six weeks, The Drift Table Weblog will return to life tomor­row. Its main pur­pose is to help me easily doc­u­ment my time with the table for the RCA and Equa­tor Project people behind the project, but I’ll also do my best to post more broadly, about mat­ters relat­ing (tan­gen­tially, I imag­ine) to the table.

See you there?

In an idle moment last week, I posted about it at MetaFil­ter. The link was picked up on by Giz­modo, and is now turn­ing up here and there.

Were I in a fan­ci­ful mood, I might sug­gest that watch­ing the link drift slowly from site to site has been a fore­taste of the inevitable hours I will spend star­ing into the Drift Table’s view­port over the coming weeks. This post is cer­tainly a fore­taste of the inevitable slew of entries on the topic over the coming weeks.