February 4, 2012

Read it and Tweet (#ReadItAndTweet) is born!

Bit of a diversion from the norm while I continue to beaver away behind the scenes on the blog redesign.

We’re launching a Twitter book club…

A conversation on Twitter between @amandafirepr @Chris_Hall1 @EmLeary @JenAndersson @rebeccataylorpr and @MissBarry, sparked by a chance book mention aaaaaand we’re off!

Presenting….the Read it and Tweet book club – we read books, and we talk about it on Twitter. Simple, eh?

Or in more traditional bio-speak:

“We meet on Twitter every other Wednesday 8pm-9pm to discuss our chosen book of the week, but it’s an informal group, so we also use the hash tag all week long to talk about what we’re reading, and share tips on great reads.”

You can discuss what you’re reading and get updates on what’s happening with #ReadItAndTweet in the following places:

The first book will chosen soon (democratically, of course) and a schedule announced, but in the meantime, feel free to start using the hash tag to talk books.

Use Wordle to keep your writing on track

Words

I just found myself on Wordle.net. I hadn’t heard of it before, but Google throws up some 900,000 results, so I’m guessing it’s already pretty popular.

Anyway, the site generates ‘word clouds’ which give you a visual representation of the most common words in a piece of text.

Here’s the result for the last few posts on this blog:

Wordle of the Emily Cagle Communications Blog

So, you can see quite easily that my recent posts have concentrated heavily on marketing and communications, and that I’ve been keeping track of business awards.

It seems to me that Wordle could be a very useful tool to help keep your marketing literature – or indeed your blog – on track. It could even be used to test for keyword frequency with a view to improving search ranking.

I’ll be posting ‘Wordles’ for my blog again, so it’ll be interesting to see how it changes over time.

In the meantime, why not try Wordle on your own blog?

Free the Blog! covers London’s world literature festival

Handwritten scribbles

Writers’ association 26 have relaunched Free the Blog! to cover the Free the Word! world literature festival.

The festival, organised by worldwide association of writers International PEN, takes place from 16-19th April at venues around London’s Southbank.

Edited by Emma Lawson, Jonathan Holt, Melissa Wolfe and Rishi Dastidar, Free the Blog! provides a home for posts about or inspired by the festival.

Writers featured at this year’s Heaven and Earth themed festival include:

  • Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)
  • Azar Nafisi (Iran/USA)
  • Tariq Ali (Pakistan/UK)
  • Catherine Millet (France)
  • Lydia Cacho (Mexico)
  • Jack Mapanje (Malawi/UK)
  • Leila Aboulela (Sudan)
  • Lee Stringer (USA)
  • Kamila Shamsie (Pakistan/UK)
  • Samir El-youssef (Lebanon/UK)
  • Wen Huang (China)

Visit Free the Word! and Free the Blog! for more information.