One Book, One Twitter

Geek alert.

There’s a new buzz on Twitter: One Book, One Twitter! #1b1t (How cool is that?!)

The dude who termed the word “crowdsourcing,” Jeff Howe, seems to have started the project and I’m just now trying to find out how it all began and how it’s going to work. Of course, I am super excited to read about it just now because Danielle and I are working on our book that is a result of studying nine mass reading events. I am specifically working on a piece that is analyzing the community-building potential of the One Book, One City model. In fact, last week I submitted a paper to Mémoires du  Livre/Studies in Book Culture called Cultural Capital and Communities. (I’ll let you know when it’s published, if you’d like.) I’m going to be participating and observing #1b1t to see what happens as this phenomenon of collective reading moves from f2f settings and tv/radio to Twitter. The fine book folks over at CBC have already paved the way with the 2010 version of Canada Reads (#CanadaReads) and CBC Books so it’ll be fun to see what someone who writes for the popular magazine, Wired, and 5, 706 followers can do with tweeters — I mean, readers– world wide.

Bah! And, the negative nellies of the world say that reading is dead.