Thing # 7b Google Reader

A favorite I follow is "Elementary Writing, The official blog of Make Literature Online project." Yesterday I found an article called "Twitter Poetry - New Genre?" Although the article is dated April 8, 2009, it is timely for me for two reasons.
At a family reunion this past weekend, one of our elders, who is an almost-80-year-old docent at the Crow Museum of Asian Art in downtown Dallas, gave a fascinating presentation on Japanese Haiku. Right away I noticed the Google Reader article's discussion of "tiwHaiku," a way of publishing one's "poetry to large number of people, to the audience that cares." TwiHaiku's official web site offers the opportunity for people to subscribe and follow the best collection of free short verse poetry online.
The Reader article goes on to describe, praise, quantify, and give examples of twiHaiku as well as taut the TwiHaiku phenomena as "Social media marriage made in electronic heaven," "TwiHaiku – Twitter hijacked all for poetry!," and as a "New poetry form for the 21th century."
The second reason the article is especially timely for me is that I will be looking into Twitter and other social networking avenues in this "23 Things" course. Twitter is further described in the Google Reader article as having"become one of the, if not the single most important Web 2.0 medium in the world. More people are joining this micro-blogging service everyday, discovering twitter poetry, and many different forms it is taking on." The article persuades readers how easy it is to contribute one's own effort at this simple literary art form.
Further, the article delves into other poetry forms, acrostics and limericks, which I also enjoy and find worthwhile in teaching elementary students. The lengthy article branches off into other matters of less interest to me, but the main emphases, the mix of Twitter and Haiku, were of an extremely timely interest to me.