750 Words: A quiet place to think

The last 36 hours have been, let’s say, interesting for Buster Benson, a Web and mobile-app developer in Seattle. Sunday night tech blogger Gina Trapani wrote a piece on her site Smarterware about a project of Benson’s that had up to then flown a little bit under the radar: 750 Words, a mashup of journaling and linguistic analysis and data visualization. What’s 750 Words? Here’s Benson:

I’ve long been inspired by an idea I first learned about in The Artist’s Way called morning pages. Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in “long hand”, typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It’s about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day. Unlike many of the other exercises in that book, I found that this one actually worked and was really really useful.

I’ve used the exercise as a great way to think out loud without having to worry about half-formed ideas, random tangents, private stuff, and all the other things in our heads that we often filter out before ever voicing them or writing about them. It’s a daily brain dump. Over time, I’ve found that it’s also very helpful as a tool to get thoughts going that have become stuck, or to help get to the bottom of a rotten mood.

750 Words is the online, future-ified, fun-ified translation of this exercise.

So far, so good. Then along came Trapani, who wields a really big stick in the world of online productivity tools. Traffic soared. By yesterday afternoon the site was staggering. By last night it was offline entirely. This morning it’s back up, but Benson has temporarily disabled new signups to help manage the load. All of this suggests a tremendous thirst for something unexpected — a small, quiet place to sit and think amid the hubbub and clatter of the Internet. Put another way, if the Internet has introduced a quotient of informational noise into our lives, maybe it’s also the Internet that can offer a bit of respite. That is, assuming unplugging entirely is a preposterous idea (which it is).

Benson is a talented guy with a real flair for data visualization (take a look at Trapani’s stats page, left — it’s just gorgeous). He’s also, in the spirit of a lot of Web guys, generous with regard to his peers. This morning, once the worst of the siege seemed to have passed, he pointed readers of his personal blog to two competing products, Ommwriter (a Mac app) and Penzu (a Web app). Both offer a bit of calm in a noisy world by pointing back toward the clarifying power of the written word. All three are well worth a look, especially 750 Words — a fantastic writer’s tool that isn’t  just for writers.