Paste to Win! (A Twitter Contest)

May 9, 2008

If you haven't been following my Twitter account, you're missing all the fun! In between going aggro on teakettles, taking an unseemly joy in crude wordplay, and in general trying to channel my incessant nattering into an attempt at being entertaining. But now I've tried to do something a little bit different, starting a little Twitter contest with some simple rules of entry:

Okay, everybody, it's Ctrl-V time! Paste into Twitter whatever text you copied last, and @anildash me. Best paste gets a prize.

Amazingly, I got 160 responses from over 150 different people, and I've assembled the results into a few categories here for your enjoyment. I removed the date stamps and other clutter from the responses, and formatted the (many!) links into readable formats with some very brief descriptions appended. The categories I've grouped them into include mundane, passwords, links, links with text, actually working, nerds and coders, explainers, jokers, WTF, and pleasant. And then, finally, from all these submissions, I name our winner, along with the surprise prize. Enjoy, and please feel free to mention your favorites in the comments.

Mundane

These were, of course, the perfunctory entries in the contest, people who had the misfortune to have been doing something simple and ordinary when the contest launched. They're all exciting, talented individuals, but just had bad luck at the time with what was on the ole' clipboard.

Passwords

I don't have any proof that all of these random strings are actually people's passwords, but I'd like to think we can hack all their accounts with this information.

Links

Ah, the bread and butter of Twitter. A surprising number of wacky or topical news stories, along with the detritus of people passing along links to their friends. Almost all of these were originally TinyURLs; I rewrote them with brief summaries for convenience, but may have sacrificed some accuracy in the process.

Links + Text

Same thing as the links, but these folks had something to say about their links.

Actually Working

The brief snippets that showed up from a few folks indicated they were actually in the middle of doing productive work when the contest began. I take no small satisfaction in having interrupted their productivity.

Nerds and Coders

Some of these could easily have fallen under the Actually Working category, but I know a lot of geeks, and that manifests itself as a lot of code, errors, system messages and the like showing up in people's copy-and-paste tweets.

Explainers

These folks were unsure about what they sent along, so they had follow-up tweets to offer context.

Jokers

I suspect that not all of these were the actual content that would have been pasted into Twitter without some editing taking place. But I don't mind so much.

WTF

Delightful non-sequitirs.

Pleasant

Consider all of these runners-up in the contest. Almost all could have fit in one of the other categories, but they ended up here because they put a smile on my face.

Winner!

And finally, ladies and gentlemen, our winner, Jessamyn West! Her WTF entry was:

jessamyn Personally, I'm after the uncontrolled growth of pubic hair. Great hedge rows, barely contained by trousers. I try to get onto th

Jessamyn offers up, after an apology to the rest of her followers, that the full quote she had copied was from a mailing list that she belongs to, and reads in its entirety: "Personally, I'm after the uncontrolled growth of pubic hair. Great hedge rows, barely contained by trousers. I try to get onto the N-Judah one day and my furry rose bush of a hair bloom parts the crowd, greeted by great choruses of outrage."

It's a striking, vivid, and moving image. And one that's well-deserving of an award, in the eyes of this judge.

In Jessamyn's honor, thanks to Donors Choose, we've funded Whoooo, Whooo Ate What? This will provide 15 owl pellets for dissection by a group of kids in 4th grade . Let's just not tell them what the winning quote in our little contest was, shall we? No need to scar them for life.

Posted 12:23 AM with tags: • • • •

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10 comments by: jessamyn • liza • Charlise • dana robinson • Mat • Dean Landsman • TheBrad • Jeff • kimmie •

Previously: "Where did this boat come from?"

jessamyn

Posted May 9, 2008 01:30

I love you.

liza

Posted May 9, 2008 10:15

as usual, you made me laugh out loud … oh, and jessmyn, you RAWK! viva la bush!

Charlise

Posted May 9, 2008 10:34

This was funny….great idea.

(lossofmemory)

dana robinson Author Profile Page

Posted May 9, 2008 10:45

i love this game…here’s an old blog post where i played a similar game with my (former) readers. always fascinating!

Mat

Posted May 9, 2008 10:58

This made my morning.

Dean Landsman

Posted May 9, 2008 11:01

Not to be redundant, but: OK :-)

TheBrad

Posted May 9, 2008 11:05

Your post ate my paste, but it was HTML and not very interesting HTML at that.

Jeff

Posted May 9, 2008 11:47

Us “coders” could never —would never— have possibly been able to copy that bit into our clipboards. ;-)

kimmie

Posted May 9, 2008 15:54

Has anyone ever told you that you’re brilliant? Very amusing. This made my morning.

Anonymous

Posted May 9, 2008 17:43

drothschild: iT WAS A QUEER, SULTRY SUMMER, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York

Isn’t that the first line of “The Bell Jar”?

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