@Pentametron

What?

These sonnets are being built in realtime by digging through hundreds of thousands of tweets per hour looking for only those few which happen to be in iambic pentameter. These tweets are retweeted on the @pentametron twitter feed and collected here in an approximation of sonnet form.

How?

Pentametron takes each of the 30-60 tweets it receives each second, and looks up each word in a dictionary which lists the stress patterns of every word. If the rhythms of all the words put together seem to add up to iambic pentameter, Pentametron considers the tweet as a possible rhyme. Right now it's doing simple rhymed couplets, but it will learn to do full quatrains soon.

Why?

To find inadvertent poetry in the endless torrents of language that slosh around the internet.