Some of you may have noticed that yesterday, we quietly added a little “What is Malcolm Doing” box in the middle sidebar on the home page of the site. In it, you will see little micro-updates to the blog, with whatever I happen to be doing at a given moment, updated anywhere from 5 to 10 times (or more) per day. I thought I should take a moment to explain why we are testing this new tool and format.

With Jillian taking over most of the heavy lifting here on the blog, and most of my attention being spent over on Yolisto, I have been looking for a way, for a long time, to get myself back in the game over here on Dropped In. Coincidentally, I also read that the “Web 2.0″ (::shudder::) company Twitter is one of the fastest growing sites online today. At first, I had always assumed Twitter was like MySpace or Facebook: great for 13 year old girls (and the men who love them), but fairly useless to the rest of us.

Who on Earth needs that much running information about someone else’s life? Who, with the exception of maybe my mom, has any interest in knowing exactly what I am doing at all times? Well, likely, nobody. The ONLY redeeming thing I can imagine regarding starting my own steady stream of “Tweets” is that it does provide a (hopefully) interesting slice-of-life here in the Yucatan. There is a ton of stuff, in the course of a day,  that has become quite normal for us, that doesn’t warrant a full blog post, and that may provide more of an insight on how it feels to live here, than we could possibly hope for by writing longer posts.

Once you actually start writing Tweets, however, you also see what a fun and addicting form it is to write under. Answering the simple question, “What are you doing,” in under 140 characters of type, forces you into a kind of open-ended haiku, where you must make the reader laugh, be clever, and make the mundane interesting, without asking your reader to follow you through the verbal obstacle-course that many have become accustomed to on this site.

If you are a reader who happens to like Twitter, sign up for your own account and follow me with Tweets of your own. You can also see a summary of all my Tweets here. If you are a reader who thinks the whole idea is stupid, drop a note in the comments and let us know why. The possibility definitely exists that I will lose interest in the whole idea of micro-updates, and your feedback will help me decide whether it stays or goes. And if you are a reader who is my mom, well, you’re probably pretty stoked right now. Enjoy!

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