Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

That's Larry Smith describing how he dreamed up Smith Magazine a couple years ago. He co-edited the new Smith book, to the six-word memoir collection, Not Quite What I Was Planning, with his Senior Editor, Rachel Fershleiser

They've been our special guests this week, both in print and in web video. Today, Larry Smith explains how an up-and-coming microblogging company Twitter changed his magazine.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions (this week, each of our guests get two-and-a-half easy questions). In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:

Larry Smith: 

Twitter was a great partnership for us, and exemplifies a lot of the way we think. Soon after SMITH launched (Jan. 6., 2006) I became obsessed with telling stories from SMITH on mobile phones. Continue reading...

I was keeping an open mind on mobile. In early fall, 2006, at a conference in San Francisco called The Future of Web Aps, I was introduced to the Twitter guys by Ted Rheingold, who created Dogster and who gives me the best advice of any entrepreneur I know.

He calls himself "the accidental entrepreneur," and I feel the same way about myself. Like most people back then, I had never heard of Twitter, but its concept of microblogging seemed like a perfect match for our micro-storytelling with six-word memoirs.

The guys who created it were totally cool, liked what we were up to as well, and two phone calls later we had a quick mashup mapped out. We Twittered out a six-word memoir a day to our Twitter followers -- which grew and grew.

So while you might not want to receive 50 six-worders on your phone -- it's overwhelming -- getting one editor's pick a day on your phone is delightful. And it's a perfect representation of what SMITH is: reader-generated (the stories pour in), but editor curated (we help sort out what we consider the best).  

For the second part of your question, I am going to let SMITH cofounder, Tim Barkow, take it as he's the tech wizard in the family. Plus, he quietly works like a dog in Portland, Oregon and no one ever asks him anything. Tim?

Tim Barkow:

I think we've barely scratched the surface of what we can do with the tools we have now: blogs, RSS feeds, databases, audio and video. One of my favorite Websites was a site called Word.com that really explored the nature and forms of interactive storytelling. We don't need more speed with our storytelling; we need more context, more insight, more thoughtfulness.

I do think that any writer (and certainly any journalist) who doesn't think he or she needs to understand this new environment and its tools is really missing out. There are trails that need blazing out there.