on writing and social media

November is approaching which means it's almost NaNoWriMo time. After much thought, I'm not going to be taking part this time around as I haven't thought through the novel I want to write yet. However, I do want to use it as a way to focus on just writing more before the end of the year. So I'm going to make a concentrated effort to post more often and also I may have a couple pieces appearing on SevenStreets. They held an open meeting inviting more contributors to join, and they liked the ideas I pitched. Rest assured dear readers, you will be the first to know if/when I get anything published there.

Also, if you're in the Liverpool area and do want to participate in Nano, there is a group that meets up to support each other and discuss their writing. It's organised by the lovely Rose, find her on Twitter as @rosiebunny.

Last night the October edition of Social Media Cafe took place at the Biennial's visitors centre, which I have now visited more often than most shops in Liverpool One. The speakers all came from artistic organisations and discussed the ways in which they used social media. Firstly the head of marketing from the Biennial and a freelance writer who had worked on their social media efforts talked about the ways old marketing ideas intersected with social media and talked about the need for creating meaningful content and interatction. Then photographer Peter (still haven't caught his last name) of Fab Collective talked about his experiences with digital photography and how Flckr helped the collective get started. Finally a very engaging guy from Liverpool Arts Regeneration Consortium (LARC) talked about his work on developing ways of connecting organisations and providing information on participatory activities going on around the city. His main project, the LARC Map looks really interesting and I'll be digging around to see what kind of listings and suggestions they provide for events around the city.

Next month is Ignite, where speakers 'enlighten an audience in 5 minutes' by making a presentation with 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. This is a really good article summing up one person's experience in organising and speaking at Ignite events around the country: http://www.oreillygmt.eu/events/things-ive-learned-from-ignite-%E2%80%93-ignite-leeds-ignite-london/

I'll be presenting on the previous incarnation of this blog and its 2010 counterpart over on Wordpress, and about independent shopping in Liverpool. Writing that is definitely going to take some Nano-style motivation!