I've written about my criteria for moderation of oneword.com entries before. This post is very specific, prompted by an ever-growing pattern I've noticed over the last few years. Let me start with one example:

The day's word: bee

"Nothing more than a struggling person trying to live their lives off someone elses salary who actually reaps the benefits of all his or her worker bees. More like his benefits, women don’t get to do shit in this world, but so what? It’s just a shitty game we all play, too bad we don’t know any other games. Fuck."

The above example is not profound, well-written—or even grammatically correct—but it follows oneword's admonition to "just write" well enough. The puzzling part is the lone, irrelevant f-bomb tagged onto the end of the entry. The term "f-bomb" is perfect here, because it really is like dropping a bomb on an otherwise relevant piece of writing. And I get anywhere from two–five entries that follow this pattern daily.

So we're clear, I have no problem with a strategically placed f-word. For instance, another entry on yellow and black, fuzzy, buzzy things:

"I am absolutely terrified of bees. A bee landed on my brand new white tee shirt in gym class when I was thirteen and it was huge. It scared the living shit out of me and I screamed and made a huge fool of myself amongst my snotty peers. I hate bees. Fuck bees."

In this example, though I don't personally hate bees, I'm right there with her.

In both cases, the entries will get approved. However, I'm taking the liberty of deleting all f-bombs as illustrated in the first example. Why? Two reasons: A) it takes the real firepower away from other people using the word intelligently, and B) it screams "I'm insecure!" which is not a part of flowing or stream-of-consciousness writing.

My mom vehemently disagrees, but I think it's the perfect word—not as a parachute—but when the parachute doesn't open.

Congratulations to our new best friend, @blueperez, who just became the 10,000th registered oneword™ user.

We are now competing with Facebook at .01% of their 500 million. And going strong.

Following in the footsteps of another .01% peer, Apple, we thought it only fitting to award number ten-thousand with a big, fat $100 gift card from our friends at Amazon.

We just hope it's not sitting in your spam folder.

Has it been a year already? Or have we never done this before? If not, we should have.

I'm a designer. What do I do?

1. Design a shirt
2. Tweet your design with the hashtag #drytshirt or post to our Facebook page
3. Feel awesome

Or, if you're not a tweeter, twitterer, or just hate birds altogether, send a jpg of your design to:

drytshirt [at] oneword.com

Are there rules or a style guide?

• minimal is good
• feel free to incorporate the "go" logo (here are vector and hi-res files)
  (not required though)
• would prefer "oneword.com" to be included, but are open to your creative genius
• don't worry about adhering to oneword.com's current color palette
• have fun

What do I win?

• a percentage of the proceeds from t-shirt sales
• the respect of friends, family, and colleagues
• bragging rights

Does the fun ever end?

• No, but submissions are due by March 1, 2011.

 

Now that the podcast is underway and steadily gaining momentum, it seemed like a good a time as any to begin featuring video episodes now and again. We've been wanting to do this for some time, we just couldn't figure out how to deal with the bandwidth issues that video can present. Well the "how" appeared in the form of a YouTube channel with visual prompts that are based on YouTube's Video Response feature. We'll then rip 'em and cut 'em up (a la the audio version). One hurdle that we've already experienced with the podcast is that writers, for the most part, are writers because that's how they communicate. In other words—they don't like to talk. I'm surprised we've received as many entries as we have already. Doing a visual version of oneword is going to introduce a similar challenge, so please forward the link to your friends (we all have at least one of those spotlight-loving friend, right?). Please visit http://video.oneword.com to dazzle the world. (We'll make you look good. Promise.)

My first article for Fuel Your Writing. Check it out.

To be a part of oneword's podcast, just call (323) 963-4417 or click the button below, enter your number, and you'll hear instructions on what to do. The podcast will be updated weekly. We'll let you know via Twitter and Facebook when we update the word. These will be used in a sort of "word montage', the full entries will not be published, so it's okay if you mess up. We're just looking for one or two good lines. So just let it flow. Note: the word here will not coincide with the word on oneword.com. Word up.