Podcast Number 1!

On Sunday, November 20, we had our second live reading in Seattle. To give you a sense of what it was like, we have made this first podcast, featuring four writers (BK, bornwithwings, rahulpratap and worldbystorm) reading once piece each. We are still experimenting with this podcast thing, and it will, no doubt, get better. Stay tuned for more podcasts and interviews coming soon!

Podcast No 1

Typetrigger Seattle Reading: August 7

Join us for a Sunday afternoon reading and meetup at Seattle's Cupcake Royale on Capitol Hill. We will be there from 4-6 p.m. sharing our works from Typetrigger (and maybe beyond). Select your favorite pieces, bring a friend, and have a cupcake and coffee while we listen to the stories we have read. We will be recording this meetup for a podcast, so that even if you can't make it this time you can hear our voices. Hope to see you there!

Better reading: new features on Typetrigger

In the next week or two, you will start to see some nice new features on Typetrigger. Several of these were developed in response to feedback from you Triggerers. At this stage, we are focussing on how to improve the browsing experience so that as we grow you can continue to find the content that is most interesting for you to read. We will be adding a full index of past triggers for your perusing pleasure, and you will soon be able to click on any trigger to see all the responses to it.

You may have noticed last week that we changed the Recent Triggers a bit: now all past triggers appear with the most liked at the top of the list. We hope this will make it fun and interesting to read what is being written and have a bit of a sense of where the community is at. Search results are similarly weighted by likes. When the trigger names are clickable, you will be able to see the full list of entries for that trigger in the search results.

We have some more fun features up our sleeve, but we'll wait until they are live to tell you about them.

Laughing while reading

A few weeks ago, we posted the very funny piece that shocky had written in response to true madness. Didn't think too much about it at the time, but one of the greatest things about that piece is that in order to understand the humor, one must actually read it. I (Lily) was talking to Bret Bernhoft, a podcaster with The Face of Media, while at Wordstock. He was asking what place the written word has these days, and I immediately thought of those delightful experiences that have to be consumed in the privacy of one's own head, and I used shocky's piece as an example of that.

In a delightful followup to those thoughts, I would like to share this piece by brand-new Typetrigger member wingback. When we scheduled the trigger "ay yi yi", suggested by a member, we didn't know what to expect, but....

In desperation, he snatched the phone and punched 0.  "Can you get me IT please?"

"Berkley IT, Ben here."  The voice was irritatingly smug.

"Yes, this is Professor Liebman in S232." He did not usually resort to title wielding, but the situation was dire.

"How can I help you, Professor?" Ben asked, smugness oozing.

He took a deep breath and tried to sound rational. "I'm using the microphone IT provided me, assuring me it would work perfectly with Dragon, even though, as I pointed out at the time, the Dragon website does NOT list it as one of its 53 preferred microphones.  Now, thanks to your assurance, my entire grant, due TO-MOR-ROW, is filled with gibberish."

There was a longer-than-necessary pause. "I'm not sure I understand what IT has to do with this.  Is there something I can help you with?" the Ben voice asked.

"Yes, you can QUICKLY provide me with a FUNC-TION-AL microphone and help me fix my grant!"

"We don't edit grants," the Ben voice oozed.  "Did you mean to dial IT? Perhaps you-"

"YES I MEANT TO DIAL EYE-TEE!" the professor exploded.  "Thanks to you MORONS, my grant,  which I have worked on for six months and which is due TO-MOR-ROW, now says "Ay-yi-yi" instead of the word EEE-WHY-EEE, as in eyeball, which appears approximately 632 times!  I did not say "AY-YI-YI", I said "EYE"!

He waited.  His heart pounded wildly.  A spray of saliva covered the phone receiver.  "HELLO?  ARE YOU GOING TO ANSWER ME?"

Finding your friends on Typetrigger

A few people have asked us about this, and here's how it works at present.

When you join Typetrigger, you are automatically Reading the person who invited you, and when you invite people, they will be Reading you. To find the friends you invited, look on your Readers list (since they are automatically reading you).

If you know that a friend has joined but you did not invite them (and were not invited by them), you can search for their user name in the search bar at the top of the site. Please note that users will not appear in search until they have published their first trigger response. We will consider making changes to this, but we really do want people to write!

Finally, some people have inquired about an email friend finder, as is included in many social sites. We know that many Typetrigger users want to write anonymously, and being found via their email would spoil their cover. For now we encourage users to share their usernames with friends outside of Typetrigger and find one another by writing and searching. We look forward to hearing more user thoughts on this problem of sociability and anonymity.