Nanoblogging and Nanofiction

A recent trend I've gotten caught up in is "nanonblogging." I think I first heard the term from podcast novelist J.C. Hutchins's HiatusCast. Basically, it's blogging in very short bursts, 140 characters or less. The first nanoblog site I joined, Twitter, asks the question "What are you doing?" and gives you a 140 character text box in which to answer, which seems to be the perfect way to sum it up. The idea is you answer that question as often as you like, all day long, via the web, text messaging, IM, or one of the dozens of third-party clients. Then anyone who is following your account gets up-to-the-minute reports of what's going on in your universe. When I first joined Twitter (I'm there as corwin, by the way), I only had a couple of people listed as "friends"*, so I wasn't getting much on my screen. But I was having an absolute blast making jokes back and forth with them through the day. And it wasn;t long before I found other interesting people out there, podcast authors I enjoy, someone who posts entries from the Chuck Norris random facts database, even characters from podcast novels. It wasn't long before I followed Chad (who originally invited me to Twitter) over to a newer site, Jaiku. While they don't have an IM interface, and their SMS interface is currently buggy at best, the offer an awesome feature Twitter does not have. When you set up your account, you can give it any number of RSS feed addresses from which it will pull information and post as nanoblog entries. So I registered (as corwin, of course) and added the URLs for this site's feed, my Twitter account, my Last.fm account, my del.icio.us links, and several others. The RSS functions at Jaiku are still a bit buggy as well, but it does pull entries from all of them in periodically. Another wildly popular feature of Jaiki is that you can post comments (which are not limited to 140 characters) on other people's posts. There are all sorts of conversational possibilities there, and I've already seen it used as an enormous question and answer board more than once. Over the course of a day, I'll post things from time to time on both sites. The other night, I spend a long time posting band lineups based on the band names with several other users, none of whom I really know. But I've discovered some real gems out there. There are a few people using Twitter to hone their creative juices by posting what I'm calling "nanofiction": fiction in 140 characters or less. Adam P. Knave has several posted, and I've enjoyed them. And today I found Zombie Attack, an ongoing story posted by two brothers about their fight against the zombie uprising. If you go to check it out, be sure to use the "next" link at the bottom of each page until you get to the very beginning. Twitter displays entries in reverse chronological order. Nanoblogging is an interesting social trend, and I'll be curious to see how it turns out. In the meantime, I'm having fun seeing what people are up to. I wish I had a better cell phone and rate plan so I could use Twitter while I'm out and about, but I pay per text message right now, and I am far too old to effectively write messages with anything less than a full keyboard. I don't know how these kids today can write things using a 12-key phone pad. If you decide to join either site, be sure to drop me a note to say hi.

* I absolutely hate when social networking sites use the word "friend" for a member of your contact list. It adds all kinds of connotations which can lead to all manner of internet drama should you decide to stop reading entries from someone. I prefer Jaiku's use of the term "contacts."