Twitter, #poetry, #kidlit... and an invitation!

It’s Poetry Friday again, with this week’s roundup at The Drift Record, the blog of Julie Larios -- one of the participants in 30 Poets/30 Days! But before you head over there, why not stick around a minute while I talk a little about Twitter (and poetry!)?

Twitter is a fast growing social network where folks “tweet” messages of 140 characters or less to each other. To make conversations trackable, people can categorize what they say by the use of the # sign (called a hashtag) within a tweet. For example, if you include #poetry in your tweet, folks can find your comment (and other people talking #poetry) by searching Twitter for the hashtag.

There are millions of users of Twitter (including President Obama), but only a few of them are tweeting about #poetry and #kidlit. National Poetry Month seems like a good time to change the former, and Poetry Friday, all the great children's poetry blog projects this month, and the growing Kidlitosphere make it a great time to change the latter, too. But why? Well...

One thing I re-learned when Fibs were spreading around the web is that there are poetry lovers in every walk of life. They may not write or read poems regularly, but they love to be reminded of it… and get re-invigorated. They’re on Twitter. Parents are on Twitter, too, maybe not spending enough time thinking about kids' books... or maybe looking for information. You don’t go on Twitter and say “buy my book!!!” of course, but if we start using #kidlit even just talking among ourselves, I'm pretty sure before long we'll meet all sorts of fascinating people who share our love of children's literature.

So my invitation to you is to join me in April, tweeting away about #kidlit and #poetry. We can share ideas and resources. We can make some poetic noise. And really, now… doesn’t that sound like fun?

You can find me on Twitter as GottaBook and also get updates from 30poems30days. I'll have more detailed information (including ideas about what to tweet to get you started) next week. I'm soooo looking forward to April here on the blog... and I'll see you in the Twitterverse, too!