“The prize will allow writers working with new media to showcase their skills, provoke discussion and raise awareness of new media writing and the future of the written word.”

This sounds like an exciting opportunity to exploit new media to the full, to show how it can transform writing, or more accurately experiencing a story. That’s what some people are claiming the iPad will do for the magazine industry, but it could be much wider than that.

At the weekend, I went on an introductory course on the open source computer programming language Processing. Processing was developed specifically for artists and others who think visually rather than in code, so although it’s a powerful, low-level tool, you can achieve amazing things with it using only a few lines of code.

In fact, a competition called Tiny Sketch has just finished, where the main rule is that programmes (or sketches as they’re called in Processing) have a maximum of 200 characters. That’s not 200 lines of code but 200 characters – less than one and a half Twitter messages! Some of the entries are amazing.