Kathryn blogged this here a while ago – and I get the impression that it can be fixed if you can get the attention of somone from twitter. Solobasssteve told me that he managed to get through the unresponsive support system and his tweets are now being picked up.

So, in the meantime, be a pal? Sign the petition!

Update: 29.7.09 – it worked! The search is now indexing my hashtags! Ppl power! Thanks to http://www.twitter.com/charles for fixing this for me.

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Last week, myself and Mick Fealty of Slugger O’Toole launched PICamp. We did it using a free-of-charge Ning website and the whole development took about an hour – soup-to-nuts (as they say in the film industry).

Mick put a couple of posts on Slugger O’Toole to get a bit of interest and within a few days we had over fifty people signed up on the site. On Friday lunchtime, I set up a PICamp Twitter account. I found a handful of key political twitterers in Northern Ireland and followed all of the contacts that they have as followers / followees. Within a short time I had nearly 1,000 people that are likely to be interested finding out about PICamp for the first time in a fairly unobtrusive way.

Over 140 twitterers were following PICamp back within 24 hours and the numbers have grown steadily since.

Anti-spam purists (and by most standards, that description fits me quite well) may find this slighlty objectionable, but by any utilitarian calculation, I’d argue that it’s OK to use a permissive system to market a non-profit conference about how social media can improve politics. 

Getting 2-300 people in the door of an unconference in London is fairly easy these days. BarCamp Belfast attracted similar numbers using a template that social media geeks would be waiting for.

Politicos, however, are another matter altogether. If we can pull something like this around, attracting around eighty people  for an afternoon of lively debate (on a weekday during a European Election campaign) I think it will demonstrate quite a strong convening power – bearing in mind that the whole of Northern Ireland’s total population is 1.7million – about a quarter of London.

None of this is that original. Kathryn Corrick helped to organise a set of Digital Britain Unconferences recently, and provides a good briefing in the basics of how to do this.

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What makes an image 'viral'?

One weakness of the name ‘memeserver’ is that you have to spell it out a lot on the phone.

“Nemeserver?” or “mem-server?” are the two common ones but there are plenty more. Initially, I thought this pointed to a poor choice of name (or name …. FAIL! as one popular viral would have it). But on reflection, I’m always glad about it. Whenever someone doesn’t pronounce it properly, you can gently introduce the subject: “Do you know what a meme is?”

When I explain the concept, most people seem to find it a fascinating one. Either that, or they are really convincingly polite.

It fascinates me anyway. Here’s the BBC’s Rory Cellan Jones’ take on the subject. Here are some viral images that have worked along with an account of why they worked.

This site is claiming that the Susan Boyle video has already had over 127 million views and counting. And here’s that dancing cockatoo if you aren’t one of the 2,271,983 people who have already seen it. Here are the ‘Top 20 Viral Videos’

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