Digital Poetry… The Captioner

The web is filled with subtle little treats. Poems, really.

These poems take many forms… Probably the most dynamic at the moment are SOME OF the words written by people on Twitter. But that’s for another day. These “poems” are the building blocks of the conversations that define a large part of so-called “social media” — they spark conversations, even sometimes repartee.

One form of digital poetry I’m quite taken by is… well I don’t really know what to call it actually. In magazines and newspapers it is practiced by those who write captions for photos. If you read The Economist you’ll know what I mean. Their wry captions are ironic… funny.

A customer recently introduced me to somebody who, I am discovering, is a clever captioner of his own photos. And it makes for fun reading. His name is Martin Varsavsky and, in addition to being a tremendously successful entrepreneur, is a witty guy.

He is a regular user of Twitxr — it’s actually one of his companies. Twitxr (which sounds like it was named by Basques.. in fact, how DOES it sound?) allows people to upload photos they take with their phone and post them with a note or caption.  Here are two of Martin’s recent captions… one is worthy of the best Economist captioners. The second is just, well, quite personal. I like them both a lot.

BTW… Martin is also very good as a longer-form writer. So check out his blog. Here’s the English version.