Zenchine – Zen Poetry Blog, Twitter, Identica, Facebook


Birch Moon, originally uploaded by chefranden.

This is an update on the Haiku, Tanka and Image Meditation project, which is purely a hobby and amateur effort but is growing and getting some traffic.

Humble origins, Twitter Haiku

The 140 character limit of twitter is not a problem for micropoetry forms such as Haiku (with a syllable structure 5-7-5 in the standard American interpretation of the form) and Tanka (5-7-5-7-7), though that can occasionally take up the entire 140.

At 11:39pm on April 16th, 2008 the new Zen Haiku Twitter account Zenchine tweeted a classic by the Haiku master Kobayashi Issa:

World like a dewdrop – though it’s only a dewdrop – even so, even so.

Zenchine Blog – Image Meditations

Image meditations were added to the Haiku Tweets which became autoposted to the new Zenchine – Haiku, Tanka, Image Meditation blog


Il Buddha di Legno nel tempio in fiamme, originally uploaded by fedewild.

Identi.ca Zenchine Zen Haiku

On October 7, 2008 the Identi.ca account for Zenchine became the primary microblogging update (echoing out to Twitter) with the original Haiku

Anxiety-filled – belly of worries, groaning – overstuffed with doubts.

Zenchine blog PageRank 3 and other Stats

[http://zenchine.com](http://zenchine.com] now has a Google PageRank3 which is pretty good and gets about 3 visitors/day, about a third direct (bookmarks, typed-in URLs), a third from Google, and a third from referrals (links on other sites). Some other stats:

With the Twitter and Identica, I estimate 5% of followers see the messages, which means around 25 folks are reading the Haiku.

Facebook Page, the Next Horizon

Today, we have added the Zenchine Haiku, Tanka, Image Meditation Facebook Page

With the positive PageRank and @reply encouragement from the Twitter followers, I am encouraged to try and produce one or more Haiku and post one or two images to the blog post and syndicate that out to Twitter, Identica and Facebook.

This is clearly an amateur effort, the quality is not great but I figure some gems will appear based on volume alone–the Ernest Hemingway approach.


The Zen Way To Start The Day, originally uploaded by Clearly Ambiguous.

Related posts:

  1. Facebook and Twitter Status Update Tools
  2. Twitter to Laconica Bridge for Identica / army.twit.tv / etc.
  3. The Credit Crunch and Social Capital – 4 Personal Branding Tips
  4. Building with Facebook – Social Dev Camp Chicago 2009
  5. Websites and PageRank – Current Projects

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