Hashtagstories – a literary memoir of social media trends
It’s almost a year since I started hashtagstories – microstories written with current Twitter hashtags.
Sorry? Stories written with what? A year ago this was weird even to me. But it was just so inspiring to combine the world of hashtags into a piece of a literary fiction that I gave it a try. I also wanted to use it as a way to enter English writing. It was looking like a pretty easy job to do – just collect meaningful, emotional hashtags and scrabble them into a story.
After a year I can tell you – hashtagstories are not easy. They are a hard work. I had to go through many Twitter-based services to find the best source of hashtag info. Previously I was using Hashtags.org, now it’s What the Trend. »»»
New cover of Hashtagstories Vol.1 – what do you think?
As I’ve almost finished a second set of hashtagstories, I decided to change a cover. There was something I didn’t like about the original one. It was pure, simple – and didn’t show how versatile can be the world of Twitter hashtags. And yes, I wanted to make it dirty.
For those who want to know, what the hash is this #hashtagstory about, please read the kick off post. The book can be downloaded from here.
Please have a look. Compare to the original one. What do you think?
Best of #hashtagstory 2009
2009 is over. In a couple of days all traces of our last year’s activity will disappear from Twitter search results. Everybody wants to shorten a year to a couple of sentences. Same with me. And I’ll naturally do it using #hashtagstory.
As I described in a kick-off post, hashtagstories were intended to bring fiction to a new level of decoding, as every hashtag means something different for a person which is using it. One line of text means much more than just one line of text. But it took me long months to realize that there is something more about hashtagstories than just that. Those stories told with a sequence of Twitter hashtags are unexpectedly good way to describe the current state of mind of Twitterverse. In a long run they will become a literary memoir of Twitter.
So here are the best (in my opinion) hashtagstories written in 2009. Decode your own story and #enjoy »»»
#hashtagstory – a literary project on Twitter
Here it is – a Twitter literary project called #hashtagstory.
A couple of days ago I decided to stop #twitnovel. The last one I wrote is here. I realized, that as a non-English writer I would be just a 7th-or-sth-level imitator of the best Twitter writers. So I started to look for a good alternative.
And, believe me or not, this was easy. Three hints got me to the point. [1] was Boing Boing’s post on “Remix the Remixer” competition, where the task is to mash up any of Lawrence Lessig’s existing work and create something new, unique and creative. [2] was my two-weeks old (=outdated) idea to make a Twitter story out of url shortened links (#urlstory). I’ve been pretty enthusiastic about that – for two hours. A need for an extensive web search to find great sites to be #urlstory’s heroes – this was too much. [3] was Twitter Magnets – a beautiful site where from random words you can create a 140-character poem and send it to Twitter.
This was leading my mind to a single morning coffee conclusion: you don’t have to write down words to create something new and meaningful. You can use the existing ones. We are living in the times of over-content. Maybe instead of adding up it’s good to mash up.
My first #hashtagstory has already landed in Twitterland. It’s ironic, that’s my style: »»»
Recently updated Polish tech-absurdist and mobile fiction writer 3.0 beta. Addicted to ebooks and technology. Guest writer at 
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