dan coulter.com

As you probably know, I have been tweeting the entire text of Moby Dick.  That’s right, the entire book, word-for-word, in 140 character (max) snippets.  Finding myself at the end of the book is a little strange.  It’s been there in my Twitter feed since I began late last July.  Now it’s over, so I thought I’d reflect and share some tidbits.

• It took nine and a half months to tweet the entire book.
• I tweeted one paragraph every hour between 8AM and 8PM CST every Monday through Friday. The length of those paragraphs were entirely up to Melville.
• It took 12,849 updates to tell the whole story.  That’s an average 64 updates per day (I said 45 on Twitter but I was wrong).
• I originally thought it would take me about a month or two, but I was oh-so-wrong.
  
• The book was published 158 years ago.  It took that long for someone to invent a way that I could handle reading it.
• I actually enjoyed reading it in these small snippets.  Sometimes it was hard to tell what was going on, but you also ended up with some really hilarious non-sequiturs.
• A nearly identical project cropped up a couple of weeks ago by someone with no knowledge of my project.  I feel bad that I preempted his (forgive me if that is the wrong pronoun) idea.  Perhaps all the people who missed my tweeting could get that going again.
• As of the last line of the book, the twitter account had 163 followers.  After all the buzz created by the completion of Moby Dick, I now have almost 120 more followers than that (at the time of writing).
• I plan to begin the next book on Monday, May 18th (my birthday!). You can vote on which book I should tweet next over at this handy dandy little poll: http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1618811/