From Lot 49: Last August, AOL accientally released the search logs of around 658,000 users.  This quickly became an internet privacy scandle, which led to the resignations and firings of several AOL employees.

Nothing too unusual here: so far, it's just another event in the ongoing loss of our rights to privacy.

What is odd--downright mysterious, actually--is the log of search queries attributed to user 23187425, which reads more like one side of an highly associative IM conversation than a list of search queries.  So in some sense, this log is readable in a literary way.  So much so that Superbunker (in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) is publishing the log in a book entitled i feel better after i type to you.

Thomas Claburn, who first made slight altercations for the sake of readablility to the log and republished them online (see above), wrote this about it at Lot 49:

Whether it's fact or fiction, confession or invention, the search monologue is strangely compelling. It's a uniquely temporal literary form in that the server time stamps make the passage of time integral to the storytelling. It could be the beginning of a new genre of writing, or simply an aberation. But it does beg further explanation. What circumstances prompted the author to converse thus with AOL's search engine?

I do find it compelling, and maybe he was right to not call it poetry as I have.  But then maybe there are a lot of poets writing today that are no longer working in poetry, however that has been defined in our culture, but in some "new genre of writing."  It certainly makes one wonder.