ReadWriteWeb

As a PR person, product developer, CEO or whatever, you're probably more interested in getting noticed by the media than developing a relationship with a particular writer.

That's one way to go about it.

Then there's that old-fashioned "building a relationship with a real person not a robot" idea. You know, treating people like people and taking the time to get to know them. Oh right, yeah, forgot about that.

Writers, like artists, are sensitive to ideas and people. But not every writer will get you or your product - and in the tech world as in any world, each writer has their own specialization. If the match is right, I guarantee they will want to get to know you and your ideas.

Tomorrow marks day one of National Novel Writing Month, a 30-day, Web-enhanced festival of writing in which thousands of people force themselves (and encourage each other) to finally write that novel they've always had in the back of their brain. The NaNoWriMo website gives participants analytics to track the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days, and anyone who finishes is a winner.

We're longtime fans of NaNoWriMo here at RWW. Editor-in-Chief Richard MacManus documented his NaNoWriMo experience back in 2003, at the dawn of our site, and we checked back in after NaNoWriMo 2008 for its 10th anniversary. With the fun starting tomorrow (surprise!), Google Docs has offered some tips about how its free, cloud-based document suite can help us all win at NaNoWriMo.

RWH Level: Beginner

When you are writing Web applications it is easy to be terse, obtuse or just plain devoid of reasonable text that conveys what a user is expected to do. Worse, a support page or even the humble README can leave fellow developers wondering what you were thinking or drinking. As with any problem, the solution involves more software!

With that in mind, it makes sense to take a look at some interesting approaches that will give you a leg up the next time you craft an epic INSTALL file.

last few months, we've focused from time to time on design and how it affects startups. One of the larger issues that comes up that goes hand-in-hand with design is the copywriting that accompanies that design. The importance of carefully crafted wording can not be understated; after all, the words are what actually speaks to your audience when they visit your site. Copywriting is as much an art and a skill as design is, and that's why the crowdsourced design network crowdSPRING is now including copywriting jobs for bids on their site.

In the last few months several startups have asked me how to approach corporate blogging. Judging by the frequency of requests, Gartner was right in suggesting that corporate blogging is rising up the "slope of enlightenment" and about 2 years away from widespread mainstream adoption. The road to enlightenment has been a long one. In the past ten years we've learned that company blogs should not be press releases, sales pitches or plagiarized quotes from Dale Carnegie. You reach enlightenment when you learn to respect your readers. If you want someone to bookmark or retweet your posts, then give them a useful resource. Below are a few approaches you can take to increase the dialogue and comments on your blog.

In 2007, Wired Magazine published an article entitled the See-Through CEO where Redfin founder Glenn Kelman gained the public's sympathy and a slew of new members by blogging his corporate woes. Lately we've been looking inward at how companies can improve their employee recruitment strategy through social media. Great candidates research you before accepting an offer, and here is what your social media profile reveals to them.

Between Skype, chat, texts, push news notifications and three screens of scrolling feeds, it's easy to get distracted while writing an email or post. If you've misspelled names, forgotten words or hit send prematurely on numerous occasions, then you probably just need to slow down. Rather than resorting to a life in the woods of hermit-like solitude, you could just take a few moments to think with Ommwriter.

Once the service for those serious enough to pay for the privilege to post, TypePad recently released a free "Micro" service. The company made the decision to offer a free product realizing the demand for a platform more formal than Twitter and less formal than Wordpress or Typepad's original product. ReadWriteWeb compared TypePad's Micro against 2 other leading light blogging tools. Below are our thoughts:

Best-selling crime author James Patterson will release a new kind of novel next month - one that's been collaboratively written with the crowd. Called AirBorne, the upcoming novel will feature 30 chapters, each written by a different author except the first and last - those will be written by Patterson himself. With the release of this book, it appears the Web 2.0 movement of collaborative writing is about to hit the mainstream.

We've written a lot about how Barack Obama's Internet strategy was a significant reason for his success last year - first in the Democratic nomination, then the Presidential election. We've analyzed how the Obama campaign made masterful use of social media and we've commented on Obama's use of the Internet as President - not to mention the rise of the goverati. Tonight we came across an extensive presentation about Obama's overall Internet strategy. We think it's well worth a read, so we've embedded it below.