Micro-blogging and other things of that tiny nature…

You’ve all heard about the craze, so I’m not going to talk too much about it, but the world really has gone micro-blogging manic.  2009 is the year that Twitter has taken off.  Now, almost everyone is on it.  You, your friends, even – though you cringe to think about it – your family.  Sure, there are heaps of pros to the site, networking mainly, as well as letting people know what you’re up to.  You can even stalk celebrities.

But, don’t let yourself be led on a narrow path.  There’s more to micro-blogging than just ‘Tweeting’ what you had for breakfast, and we can only hope there is more to Twitter than the unfortunate language associated with it.  Your life is interesting, and it’s time the world knew it, so I am here to broaden your horizons.

Before Twitter was the word on everyone’s lips, the trend of saying more with less had already become well established not only on the internet, but in literature.  Ernest Hemmingway allegedly wrote a six word story, and, while the nature of his involvement is anyone’s guess, some consider the little gem to be his best work.  The story: ‘For sale, baby shoes, never worn’ is simple enough, but not so much that you read it without thinking.  In being concise, Hemmingway gives you more out of the sentence, and it becomes unique for everyone, and they imagine the story behind the shoes.

As for saying more with less, don’t just limit yourself to the classic six word story, there’s more where that came from!  Recent winner of the 2009 Webby awards for best micro-blog, the site onesentence.org has quickly risen to glory, probably not so much in the wider Darwin community, but certainly in other parts of our vastly connected planet.  The website takes submissions from anyone, but your story has to really stand out to be published on the site.  The only rules of the site are that the story you submit has to be true, and it has to be one sentence long. So head down to onesentence.org and check it out.

If you don’t think that you can fit your extensive travels into one sentence, or, you think nothing of great consequence or interest ever happens to you, there is another answer.  The guy who runs the Six Sentences blog has much the same idea as onesentence, but he looks at it through different goggles.  The stories are mostly creative, with some biographical one mixed in, and, unlike the anonymity that comes with onesentence, the blog offers writers a chance to add a small bio, with a little bit about who they are.  If you want to submit your work to the Six Sentences website, your story must of course be six sentences but that’s not all.  The most successful contributors have stories that really grab at the readers at the first sentence and still have their claws in them at the last.  All of the submission details are on-site at sixsentences.blogspot.com.

But what if you just can’t be bothered to write six sentences, or even one?  Where do you go next?  Well, I guess to find that out you will have to check us out next week while I explore some more facets of micro-blogging you may not know about.