Stories wanted, but please be brief

Smith Magazine is taking the classic “six-word challenge for writers” and allowing users to submit their own versions. Check out the fun at smithmag.net/sixwords/ where readers are posting their own versions of this curiously modern genre.

Legend has it Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a story in just six words. Supposedly he came back with: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

The submissions here at SmithMag are all over the map, charting the sublime to the silly.

Two we found: “Cursed with cancer, blessed with friends” or “I still make coffee for two.”

Let us know if SR readers have added gems of their own to the site. E-mail your six-word submissions to TXT @spokesman.com; the two most entertaining of those will earn the writer a $10 coffee card on us.

Wetpaint.com

Smart Seattle startup does wikis right. (Six words: see how easy?)

Wetpaint.com is a clever Seattle site that does one thing especially well. It helps others develop and build wikis — collaborative online exchanges that give people fast and simple ways to share ideas and edit one another’s comments.

The site, freshly infused with a new round of healthy venture funds, now adds the option of RSS feeds to a Wetpaint wiki.

We recommend visiting Wetpaint and looking for a wiki on a favorite topic, sports team or TV show. “Battlestar Galactica,” for instance, has a handful already. Others with busy activity are wikis on “House” and “Top Chef.”

Lifelenz and your family story

American Storykeepers’ LifeLenz.com is a social network site allowing people to create family photos, audio, video and chronicles and memoirs of their lives.

Think of it as an online audio visual scrapbook, meant to be collected and passed along to your next generation. On the other hand, isn’t it kind of risky to develop an online family memoir when who knows what we’ll be doing with Web information in the next 20 years?