Twitlit: The twitterature revolution

Tim Walker in The Independent:

Twitterature_276564t This Christmas, among the Harry Potter parodies and pub-quizzable miscellanies that litter the humour shelves in Waterstones, you'll find at least four titles that were either “crowdsourced” on Twitter, or written in chapters of 140 characters or less.

The World According to Twitter: Crowd-sourced Wit and Wisdom from David Pogue (and His 350,000 Followers) is the work of The New York Times technology writer Pogue, who asked his Twitter followers questions ranging from “What's your greatest regret?” to “What's the best bumper sticker you've seen lately?”, then collected the best of their responses and published 2,524 of them in book form.

“Compose the subject line of an email message you really, really don't want to read,” goes the first request. The responses include “To my former sexual partners, as required by law” and “Your Dad is now following you on Twitter”. To the prompt “Add 1 letter to a famous person's name; explain”, witty users replied with “Malcolm XY: Civil rights activist, definitively male”, and “Sean Penne: Starchy, overcooked actor/activist”.

More here.