Writeyness :: Info to snack on

Projects I’ve worked on over the last few months include…

• A content plan for a US renewable energy company’s website
• A 7-day email course covering Internet marketing strategies
• An 8-day email course promoting a health career advisor’s ebook to be sent to his opt-in list
• A content plan for an Ireland-based careers advisor’s new website
• Several keyword-focused short articles and press releases designed to attract more traffic to a marketing services website
• Two website reviews for small business websites
• An outline for a book on Internet research
• This blog (but not nearly enough due to the above)

This is the blog of Tincan Communications, a company that provides copywriting and content services for small businesses, sole traders, large companies and agencies — for both online and offline communications and publications. I’m the senior writer, well, the only writer just now, although I do involve other writers — and designers — on a project-by-project basis.

This blog will feature news and tips on content and copywriting, samples of writing I like, any Internet writing and marketing tools I come across and can recommend, book and software reviews, and — in true “blogger” style — any other “writeyness” that springs to mind.

Feel free to comment on anything that sparks your interest or drop me a line at rob at tincancommunications dot com. Comments are moderated to avoid spam etc, but they’ll appear reasonably quickly.

People make up words online all the time. “Google,” the verb, has just entered the dictionary. “Blog” is another. “Podcast” another still. And now… “writeyness”!

Well, not really. “Writeyness” isn’t a word. Not yet anyway. But if Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” can be a word, so can “writeyness”.

I can’t take credit for it. That has to go to the sinisterly-named “mr_wombat” who used it in the page that came top of the 17 results that turned up when I googled “writeyness.”

However, it seemed like as good a name as any for a blog like this, better than The Tincan Communications Blog anyhow. So I may as well give it a definition:

I would describe “writeyness” as follows:

Noun: Writeyness

Writeyness can be seen as random thoughts and views typed into the Internet to be read later by persons unknown — mostly “infosnackers”.

For example, “Did you read Wendy’s latest blog post – it was a great piece of writeyness?” Or, “I came down with a serious bout of writeyness last night, and wrote 104 blog posts.”

Adjective: Writey

People feeling writey might turn to Writely to ease their writeyness. For example, “Bring me my laptop — I’m feeling writey.”

In pre-Internet days, the main outlets for people overcome by writeyness would be newspaper columnists, people who wrote letters to newspapers, fanzine publishers, and journal writers (or at least, journal writers who allowed people to read their entries, not the ones that wrote in mysterious books with a lock on them like your little sister used to. Well, like my little sister used to.)

These days, when there is more self-published content around than ever before thanks to the Web, writeyness is everywhere. But mostly in blogs. Including this one, judging by the length of this post.