Black Crown is a forthcoming Random House project by Failbetter. It’s not playable yet, but there’s a sign-up page here and Wired gives some additional background.
Dave Morris (Frankenstein) weighs in on whether randomness is really a help to interactive fiction, tying the question in with gamebooks and computer adaptations of gamebooks.
Deirdra Kiai gives an interview on the claymation point-and-click adventure Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings”, discussing the gender roles, inspirations from Fallen London, the claymation process, and various other features.
The XYZZY Awards are now in second-round voting, with the nominees chosen. This year’s crop includes Twine and StoryNexus content as well as parser-based IF. You can vote here; authors may not vote for their own games and are discouraged from posting “vote for me” sorts of messages, but otherwise the voting process is open to anyone through May 7.
Various people, including Warren Spector, Kevin Bruner (Telltale), Stéphane Bura (Storybricks) and me, will be speaking about interactive storytelling at the IFOG symposium May 10 in Mountain View.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
I’ve made a YouTube video out of my GDC talk. I was sorry you missed it, as I had some ideas in it that I thought you might be interested in. The video is here:
Three of the four examples are playable. The fourth, I’m finishing up now and should be online in a week or so.
Cool! I do apologize for missing it — it was on my schedule, but then I wound up needing to meet up with someone during that timeslot. (The perennial thing of GDC is that I have about three things I want to be doing at any given time…). Anyway, thanks for letting me know!
…and followup here.