Microblogging a Novel: A Review of WriteSomething.net

Sometimes an everyday item just needs a little tweak to be turned into poetry. The folks over at Writesomething.net have done just such a tweak. They've taken a very familiar microblogging platform and turned into a novel collaborative writing tool.

When you arrive at the site, you see simply a stream of words and phrases in paragraph format with a box for input at the bottom, and a button that says publish. Type anything you want in the box and it will be added to the stream. Sounds like Twitter, Friendfeed, and Identi.ca, right?

Well, there's a twist. The posts at Writesomething.net are intended to be read as a continuous book, not as individual "tweets" or "comments." Anything that goes in the box, whether it be overtures of love to Johnny Depp, political commentary, everyday observations, or even spam, becomes part of this now 3,500 page book. What comes out is a strange but intriguing cacophony of ideas, bordering on the nonsensical.

Many writers describe their own process as merely throwing words down on a page to see what becomes of them. This is the same, but thousands of writers are participating rather than one. A simple chain e-mail or spam message becomes part of a longer commentary on culture. Teen fads are juxtaposed  with comments about what it must be like to be a cat.  In a postmodern landscape, a project like this points out how ridiculous a notion it is that writing should make sense, and its all-inclusive approach really makes us stop and think about what constitutes a "book" in the traditional sense.

In a world of real-time updates and constant back-and-forth, Write Something asks the question: What if this worldwide communication system isn't a conversation at all, what if it's one continuous story that we're all making together?