Nick Douglas has spent a lot of time on the Internet. Douglas was the founding editor of Valleywag, Gawker Media’s Silicon Valley blog, and is the now senior editor of the AOL blog Urlesque. He also penned the definitive book on Twitter. Yes a book! This week he, along with artist Erin Fusco, launched Big [...]

column

For those of you not ‘in the know,’ The Awl is a blog run by former Gawkerers Choire Sicha and Alex Balk. Now, I read The Awl every day, and usually like it. But I was offended — unironically, actually offended — by an Awl post this morning titled “What Were Black People Talking About On Twitter Last Night?” At the risk of getting randomly harshed on by Tumblr: it was kind of racist.

Nick Douglas‘ Twitter Wit is a compendium of what he bills as “the funniest tweets of all time,” so the top five from those should be hi-larious. Right? Eh, you can decide that for yourself, but the point is, Douglas and publisher Harper Collins picked their five favorite Tweets from the book for a new promotion, which is about as un-Twitter as it gets: Inviting people to make a video based on one of those tweets. The filming! The editing! The uploading! Geesh, 140 characters never sounded so time-consuming.