For all the chatter on Twitter, the social networking tool is still very much driven by short written messages. But imagine if you could add your own voice to your Tweets?

That’s the idea behind Chir.ps, a new service that launched today from Seattle-based Entertonement. In addition to broadcasting audio messages via Twitter, the sounds also can be distributed via email, blog posts and incorporated into ringtones for mobile phones.

The idea is to make the sharing of audio clips as easy as sharing a photo.

Chir.ps also has a Retweet function so you can distribute audio messages from your friends or pick from thousands of audio clips already uploaded through Entertonement’s Web site. (Check out my Twitter account to try to identify an audio clip from a famous movie.)

I’ve been playing around with the service today. It’s pretty cool, though my first Chir.ps message got cut off after a few words.

Entertonement founder David Aronchick said that’s not supposed to happen and they’ve been ecnountering a few bugs for those using Macs. But he’s working on that problem and says those using PCs can leave Chir.ps of any length.

"We’ve internally tested having the recorder on for an hour, and uploaded some sample clips that were three hours long," he said via email.

The company doesn’t have an iPhone app at this time, and is instead trying to partner with folks such as PixelPipe and Tweetree.

“We looked at all the great multimedia services that enriched the Twitter community, and saw an unmet need for sharing what we hear in the world around us," said Aronchick.

Entertonement — founded in 2006 — is backed by Redpoint Ventures.

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and Here’s the Bing contest winner  

Microsoft today named the winner in its Bing Summer Travel Photo Contest, in which people competed for the right to have their images displayed on the home page of the company’s search engine. Jeremy J Somers of Australia won with the photo below, which will be the Bing.com background image on Aug. 3. See more finalists here.

Previously: Behind the scenes with team behind those scenes at Bing

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and Bellevue power outage leaves high-tech companies in the heat  

The failure of a lightning surge protector has caused a power disruption in downtown Bellevue, knocking out power to tech companies on one of the hottest days of the year.

The failure — which occurred at about 9:40 a.m. — was not heat related, a Puget Sound Energy spokesman tells the Puget Sound Business Journal. And it appears to have impacted companies on both sides of Interstate 405, including Overlake Hospital and The Bravern where Microsoft has employees.

Power is expected to be restored by 1 p.m. or 2 p.m.

We’ve talked to folks in the Civica Building south of downtown Bellevue and their power is on. Let us know if you are experiencing problems. 

The power failure in Bellevue follows a disruption earlier this month at the Fisher Plaza data center where a small fire knocked out dozens of Web sites for more than 30 hours.

We’ve not been able to determine that any data centers have been impacted by the Bellevue outage. We have a call into Microsoft to see how their employees are coping.

UPDATE 2:15 p.m.: Microsoft says that power has been restored at the Bravern.

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Nicholson Baker v. Kindle  

There have been many product reviews of Amazon.com’s Kindle, though none have described the buzz around the electronic reader as "an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization." That’s just one of the gems in writer Nicholson Baker’s lengthy essay on the device in the New Yorker.

One of the funniest parts is Baker’s unpackaging of a Kindle, which he describes in somewhat ghoulish terms:

Within, lying face up in a white-lined casket, was the device itself. It was pale, about the size of a hardcover novel, but much thinner, and it had a smallish screen and a QWERTY keyboard at the bottom made of tiny round pleasure-dot keys that resisted pressing. I gazed at the keys for a moment and thought of a restaurant accordion.

Later:

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

The essay continues along such skeptical lines, with Baker writing toward the end:

On the other hand, there’s no clutter, no pile of paperbacks next to the couch. A Kindle book arrives wirelessly: it’s untouchable; it exists on a higher, purer plane. It’s earth-friendly, too, supposedly. Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled.

It’s an amusing read.

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