Luke Alexander's blog

If you’re employed by a marketing or digital agency, and want to get some first hand experience of what is at the core of the term ‘social network’, head down to the Royal Festival Hall on Tuesdays during November from 6-8pm.

I was there for a NaNoWriMo London write-in this week, which was an ample demonstration of online social networking at its finest.  iPhones were out on the table, netbooks flitting between facebook and twitter; if I saw a photo in years to come I would be able to confidently state, based only on evidence of the technology lying around, that it was 2009.

These devices on their own were meaningless; what made it a great demonstration of the power of online social networks is the fact that we were almost all strangers, meeting because we a) had a shared interest and b) had been given the tools to share it.

Indeed, the event brought back to me the meaning of the term, which I use so regularly in my day job that it has begun to lose its meaning.  In fact, the way some marketing professionals use it, you’d think anything which has ever touched a web server would qualify.

Words, even technical terms, should retain a little bit of magic that lets them thrive and grow with their meanings.  Words aren’t fixed concepts, like numbers – they have the benefit of an etymology, heritage and resistance to translation which allows them to mean, in a way, more than their meaning.

Email – electronic mail.  Internet – an international network.  Web – a world wide web of linked information.  All of these terms get submerged in the sheer number of people rushing to market, package and deliver them.

At any rate, this NaNoWriMo meet-up made me re-consider the power of the social network, in its online context.  When I was a lot younger, the technological underpinnings of online activity were much more limiting – no facebook, myspace or twitter.  But social networks were still the order of the day, even if that wasn’t how we referred to them.

Back then, I interacted with my online social networks using livejournal, usenet newsgroups and IRC.  What was true then, however, is still true now.  Social networks are created when people, using whatever tools they have at their disposal, create pathways of regular or expected communication between themselves.  Facebook, linkedin, elgg, etc all provide excellent tools to achieve this, but the core principle is that those users are the active element in the equation.

This is not the same as saying that social networks operate on a content-driven model (which may or may not be true).  Sharing cool virals and whatnot is a great strategy for many companies hoping to take advantage of social networks, but it is not the way to create social networks.  To do this, you need to provide users with the tools they need to connect as well as, of course, a reason to connect in the first place – whether it’s getting to know their colleagues, finding music from new bands, or writing a novel in a month.

Five days in, and I’m definitely starting to feel the difficulty of keeping up 1,667 words a day. I’m doing ok at the moment, coming in just under the guide wordcount of 6,667 for yesterday.

The Southbank meet-up was fantastic, and gave me a little peek into how surreal a concept it is that so many people around the world are all taking part in a group activity which is at its core a very individual, personal activity.

Particularly motivating was hearing about other peoples’ stories. I think I had worried a little too much that everyone else would be writing deep, intense, poetic literary fiction, or something equally serious. Refreshingly, the focus is clearly very much on writing something you would personally want to read – with all genres represented from sci-fi and camp fantasy to young adult and historical fiction.

Even more refreshingly, the variety of people attending was fairly wide – although understandably skewed slightly towards the sort of people who would be able to reach the Southbank Centre for 6pm on a work night.

There is another write-in tonight at the British Library, which I am not going to be able to make. But I hope to do plenty of writing tonight regardless, and catch up with everyone next week. Wish me luck!

So I’ve completed my first day of writing as part of NaNoWriMo, and I’m now very excited to be taking part in what I’m sure will be an absolutely exhausting month of novelising.

I’m enjoying having the impetus to write without worrying overly about every little technical or factual nubbin.  I’m loving having the excuse to sit down and write rather than putting it off on the basis that I’ll never be able to finish it anyway.

I’m also very aware that tomorrow’s 1,667 words will be a hundred times harder to write, and that there will be days where I simply can’t fulfil my writerly obligations.

In the spirit of sharing, here’s some words from the first two pages of my novel:

• smacked
• whitebait
• mysterious
• scholar
• dyed
• bundle
• disappointed
• hugging
• temple
• merchantile

I’ve resolved that this year will be the year I join in with NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated, this is a global month of novel-writing, where everyone who has at some point considered writing a novel is challenged to actually write one during the month of November. Last year they had more than 119,000 participants.

The goal is to get to 50,000 words by the end of the month – the “Great Frantic Novel” – with the idea being to concentrate less on crafting the perfect phrase and more on actually writing a novel.

I’ll be updating my profile at NaNoWriMo and posting updates here if anything exciting happens.

Wish me luck!

I couldn’t let today pass without marking it in some way – though certainly not as expertly as XKCD has done.

My first ever web presence was on Geocities, and I can still remember the excitement of having contributed something on a global level in a way few people had ever done before.  As time goes on and the web relentlessly increments its version numbers, it’s important to remember how significant and emotionally impactful this was for the first ‘mainstream’ users of the web.

Geocities – with its free accounts, easy page creation and ‘anyone can be a web publisher’ attitude – is a shrine to that, and in a way it is the first ever global, virtual ruin.  A reminder of how innovation is an evolutionary process.

When Yahoo! bought it it was already one of the web’s running jokes.  In less than a decade, its naive, optimistic attitude and steadfastedly Web 1.0 attitude had become hopelessly out of date, and it didn’t even have the geeky elitism of Usenet and IRC or the early adopter community of Livejournal to redeem it.

So RIP Geocities.  I can’t help feeling something should go permanently in its place to mark the occasion.  Preferably surrounded with BLINK tags…

(I can’t remember the exact URL of my Geocities site, but I remember it was in the Area51 ‘neighbourhood’, that it had a purple background, and orange text, all achieved through judicious use of TD, TR, BGCOLOR and FONT FACE tags.)

Update: xkcd has now taken down its tribute; sorry if you missed it