#lessthan61: A Nanoblogging Manifesto
On 27 April, 2009, I tweeted as follows:
Sometimes, use 60 chars or less. 140’s too easy. #lessthan61
The idea: If we’re going to take microblogging seriously as a mode of composition, let’s take it, well, very seriously.
So, call it nanoblogging, if you like—mathematically dubious, but no less catchy—or call it nothing. Just do yourself the favor of giving it a try.
A few guidelines:
- You’re on the honor system with your character counts. On the other hand, anybody anywhere could check your work.
- #hashtags don’t count, and neither do @replies, and neither should any other inline metadata that we may yet encounter.
- Why stop at 60? Step down to 40 (picoblogging?) or 20 (femtoblogging?) if you can, using #lessthan41 and #lessthan21. But keep it attached to batches of 20, if you please.
I write this post to give the practice a fixed point of reference, which may be useful, since in case it becomes something, anything, it will be fluid.
May 8th, 2009 at 8:01 am
Don’t ask me why I didn’t bring this up yesterday. A spoof video went around about a month ago for Flutter (nano-blogging…less than 26 characters).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeLZCy-_m3s
May 8th, 2009 at 8:18 am
Nice. When I came up with the “nanoblogging” term—an obvious one, it seems—I googled it. Missed the hilarious Flutter video, though. Of course, for me, the video misses the point. If you’re invested in writing across forms, there’s a real challenge here.
Why not something like flutt.er? First, Eritrea may or may not be open to domain hacks. Second, for focused nanoblogging to get even a little interesting, it has to take place in the middle of the fire. And while I wish we’d all switch over to Identi.ca, at the moment, the fire’s on Twitter.
August 3rd, 2009 at 1:07 am
[...] Some nano-bloggers now want to see "picoblogging" or "femtoblogging." Nostalgic micro-bloggers, on the other hand, are worried: "Has nano-blogging gone too far?" Well, maybe not far enough. I guess the next extreme would be "Non-blogging:" say nothing at all (but do so in public). [...]