Tinywords
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tinywords, founded in November 2000 by D. F. Tweney (aka Dylan Tweney), is an online English language haiku journal that publishes one haiku or senryu every weekday on its website (haiku are a very short form of Japanese poetry that are usually three lines, with 17 syllables or less). Threre are more than 10,000 visitors to its website each month.
There is also a free mailing list that sends each daily haiku to subscribers, either by email or mobile phone (including SMS phones and pagers, and smartphones). The daily haiku is also available as an RSS web feed.
As of October 2006, there were over 2,700 subscribers to the mailing list, making it the largest English-language haiku mailing list on the internet[1]. As a publisher of haiku, that also makes it the largest circulation English-language haiku publication[2].
Contents |
[edit] SMS (Short message service) mobile phone subscriptions
Because haiku are so short, they can be messaged to cell phones and text pagers using SMS. The daily haiku from tinywords.com are designed to be under 100 characters to fit the limits of most SMS devices. Tinywords has instructions on how to subscribe for users of the major US cell phone carriers and SMS services. There is also a table that shows how to figure out your cell phone's email address based on its phone number.
[edit] Smartphones and PDA subscriptions
There is an Avantgo channel version of the website that is specifically designed to display properly on internet-capable smartphones and PDAs.
There is also an I-mode version of the website for NTT DoCoMo's I-mode service for mobile phones that is very popular in Japan and becoming popular in Europe.
[edit] Additional website features
- Haiku archives
On the website visitors can check out previous daily haiku in the archives, as well as post responses to a haiku or see what others have written on the haiku. From the archives you can search for particular poets, or a specific word (you can find all the spider haiku that tinywords.com has featured, for example).
- Haiku postcards
From the website you can also email haiku postcards featuring haiga (a combination of artwork and haiku).
[edit] Notes
- ^ David G. Lanoue's haiku-a-day mailing list for translations of Kobayashi Issa's haiku (from Xavier University of Louisiana) has around 1,000 subscribers [1]
- ^ The Haiku Society of America, publishers of the haiku journal Frogpond had 832 members at the end of 2005[2].
