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After briefly looking at Web 2.0 Awards & Webware I went back to Web 2.0. Web 2.0 was easier to look through. Some of the award winners I found rather silly, such as onesentence.org; didn’t see any real reason for this one.

Is it weird that I enjoy these jabbing reviews of 1S?

You may have noticed, last week we hit story #1000^*, which is a milestone of sorts, I suppose.

There will be some more news related to this later this week. But for now, I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to everyone that’s submitted a sentence. You make the site what it is, quite literally.

Now, let’s get to work on the next thousand.

^* It should be noted that this isn’t technically the 1000th story since there are a few stories that were deleted and not replaced. But, hey, close enough.

A few more interesting incoming links worth mentioning:

• Top 5 Daily put together a nice post linking up and quoting some of their favorite sentences. It’s a shame they feel that “many [sentences] are really lame.” I swear, I try hard to avoid the lamest of the lame!
• Neat-o-rama
• Cliff Pickover’s Reality Carnival
• The Latest at Del.icio.us podcast
• Ryan and Katie’s blog is run by a different Ryan.

There have been a lot of others, too. The traffic this month doubled our previous best by mid-month. Crazy.

Well, not really, because I still have my job. But The Mighty Dooce did send a fair amount traffic One Sentence’s way yesterday via a link in her sideblog. That also resulted in some time on del.icio.us‘ “popular” page. Nice.

While some del.icio.us bookmarkers “doubt the veracity of [the stories'] author(s)” or “think it would work better as a magizine [sic] column than as a website,” one comment really made my day: “Fray.com meets Twitter: one-sentence long true stories. This is the kind of thing that reminds why I work on the Web.” Thanks, Jeremy.

55Friday is featuring their own collection of single, true sentences today. Check them out.

Thanks to everyone else that’s been linking 1S up on their sites, Livejournals, MySpace blogs, etc. Keep the content coming and feel free to drop me a line to say hi or offer any suggestions.

It’s kind of weird to find out you were up for an award after the awards have been given out, but it’s still pretty cool. In this case, it’s seomoz.org’s Web 2.0 Awards. One Sentence placed second in the “Fun Stuff” category, behind Cocktail Builder. I also appreciate the fact that their blurb about the site was only one sentence. See, I notice these things.

Also got a nice mention over on Kris Abel’s blog on CTV.ca. Thanks to Mungo Says Bah for passing the link along.

My new favorite StumbleUpon comment about the site:

“A for effort. D+ for content.”

Another potential tagline!

Nice: One Sentence was linked up on a USA Today blog.

Last week, I quietly unveiled a new feature I’d been meaning to implement for a while: a new “Popular” page. Now, the “Popular” page shows the 25 most popular entries posted in the last 30 days. This is much more interesting than the previous incarnation of the page, which just showed the top 50 entries of all time (and, thus, rarely changed).

Of course, the old page is still around, if you’re interested.

I’m finally getting around to revisiting some of the unapproved entries from early in the site’s life. So, each day when I approve entries, there’s a nice mixture of new ones and ones that had been sitting patiently, waiting for the thumbs up.

Lastly, a couple of nice incoming links:

• It was nice to get a mention from the ever-popular Grammar Girl (man, she’d have a field day with some of the entries I’ve seen!)
• Over on Seasonal Plume, she picks out a few of her favorite sentences

Jeez, has it really been since October that I last posted here?

We only had a few entries for the Halloween tag contest. I picked a winner and e-mailed them. There was no response and so I had to eat the rest of our Halloween candy. Oh well. (I don’t even remember who I chose, so just go read ‘em all.)

People continue to write to ask “Where’s my sentence?” Sometimes, they even submit sentences about it. In addition to my original list, let me add two more things that will keep your sentence from being published:

• No tags. If you don’t use tags, it means that I have to read your sentence and add some by hand. This costs me time and I will usually bypass entries with no tags for that reason. I won’t necessarily disapprove them, but they tend to sit in the queue for a very long time. If you don’t understand the concept of tags, just think “keywords.”
• Poor punctuation. Please capitalize properly. Don’t be lazy.

It still amazes me that people submit multiple-sentence stories. You’d think the name of the site might tip people off, but you’d be wrong. And please, please try to tie your sentence into a real-life story. Straight confessionals are more appropriate for PostSecret. I don’t want One Sentence to become “PostSecret for People Too Lazy to Make a postcard,” you know?

Anyway, thanks for all the submissions. There have been some real gems, so keep ‘em coming. I’m definitely being more selective now, so make sure that you take a few extra seconds when composing your sentence.

We’ve had some interesting incoming links recently. I think some professors must be mentioning it in their classes because in addition to a lot of .edu submitters, there are a number of .edu referrers in the logs (usually password-protected pages, though). One such referral came from Wheeling Jesuit University, of all places. If you’re a professor who is using One Sentence in their class, drop me a line.

Also got a nice referral from Russia recently. Alexander was kind enough to send me a translation of what he wrote:

“One Sentence is a literature project, with very simple rules: participants write stories in just one sentence. I remember an anecdote:

A university creative writing class was asked to write a concise essay containing the following elements:

1. Religion
2. Royalty
3. Sex
4. Mystery

The prize-winning essay read: ‘My God,” said the Queen, “I’m pregnant. I wonder who did it!”

Not one sentence, but mighty impressive, no less!