RNA Conference 2009 - Live Updates of the Action!

Hi romance readers, writers and other interested persons!

This weekend is the annual Romantic Novelists’ Association’s conference, this year being held at the University of Cumbria at Penrith. The conference always generates a flurry of blog posts and photos in its aftermath, but generally the attendees are too busy chatting, learning, workshopping and, um, supporting the bar, to actually blog during the conference.

But not any more. It’s 2009, and we’ve entered the age of wifi internet access, tiny super-portable netbooks, and…Twitter!

Over the conference weekend (10th to 13th July) some conference attendees are going to be twittering updates from seminars, workshops and the gala dinner. Whenever we do this we’re going to be adding the designated conference hashtag (#RNA09) to our updates.

If you’re interested in reading all the tweets from the conference, go to Twitter's search page - http://search.twitter.com/. You don’t need a Twitter account to do this. Then type the hashtag #RNA09 into the search box and search, and all the tweets with that tag will come up.

Alternatively, bookmark this link now: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23rna09 and check out the updates as they start to arrive on 10th July.

Official RNA Twitter account: http://twitter.com/RNAtweets

Individual members’ Twitter accounts:

Alex Brown – http://twitter.com/alexbrownbooks
Imogen Howson - http://twitter.com/imogenhowson
Kate Lace – http://twitter.com/LaceKate
Katie Fforde – http://twitter.com/katiefforde
Liz Fenwick - http://twitter.com/lizfenwick
Lynne Connolly - http://twitter.com/lynneconnolly


Explanatory note re. Twitter:

Twitter (www.twitter.com) is one of the latest social networking phenomena. Basically, it’s a form of micro-blogging. You go to the above site, choose a username and password, and start updating the world by answering Twitter’s one and only question: “What are you doing?”

From that one basic starting point, you can ‘follow’ other people’s Twitter accounts, reply to their updates (‘tweets’), have other people follow you, and join in huge Twitter conversations using hashtags.

A hashtag is Twitter's really cool way of keeping up with a particular topic, even if you're not personally following all those involved in it. It also means that anyone—even those not signed up to Twitter—can follow that topic. If you want to see it in action before the conference try typing #queryfail or #doctorwho into the search box.