Martin Wright.tv

I’ve been wanting to give Kiva a try for a long time and the trip to Peru was encouragement enough. I issued a few loans when we got back and was very impressed. Its great that as a microcredit service you get to choose who the money goes to and you receive the money back for reissue on loan completion. This gives more long term involvement with lending than many other lend-and-forget microloan services.

I recently decided to use some of my unused 0% interest free credit limit to increase my Kiva lending. While slightly risky there seemed little justification for not going trying it out. The money could be much better used by people that need a loan, than by sitting unused on my credit card statement. I chose loans which would be repaid in less than 6 months and only loaned $25 per per person to spread the risk of any delinquent payments.

Follow the progress of my loans and consider lending yourself.

There was a fair amount of activity on Twitter happening at Think Visibility. Here’s some pointers on how to make the most of Twitter at an event like Think Visibility.

Buildup

Watch the #thinkvisibility hashtag
Follow the event Twitter account @thinkvisibility
Join in the conversation
Follow the speakers
Follow interesting people

At the event

Those you have followed will now appear in your Twitter stream
Continue watching the event hashtag
Continue following interesting people as they appear
When talking to people, ask them for their Twitter name and follow them

Post event

Catch up with your new followers and follow them
Post Tweets about the event
Find to presentations being posted about Think Visibility with Twitseek.

Nottingham Twestival is taking place at 7.30pm on Thursday 10th September 2009 at Muse, Hockley. This time round the very worthy charity is The National Autistic Society – Nottingham.

Volunteer meetups are currently taking place with much more help than last time, thanks all! With the venue agreed it is now the interesting part of finding sponsorship, getting raffle prizes and choosing bands.

To find out more about Nottingham Twestival , check the blog and follow @nottstwestival.

Web 2.0 Surgery is going from strength to strength with the fifth event.  There is another great line up of experts ready to answer questions on everything Web 2.0 and internet related.

As part of figuring out the Nottingham Tech Scene there is now a wiki page to track the tech companies, web companies, web design companies, games companies and tech events based in Nottingham.

Please feel free to add your company to the Nottingham Tech Scene wiki.

It seems appropriate to find out about a virtual festival through a friend on Facebook who I’ve never met. This lead to a shared experience with hundreds of other festival-goers who never get to meet each other.

The Invisible Festival is taking place over the weekend of 8/9 August 2009. The venue for the festival is wherever you want it to be. The soundtrack is the same but the venues are different. The very simple idea being that you invite all your friends to your place and you listen to a set playlist. This happens at many different venues but the experiene is shared on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Its all provided free but donations are requested for Cancer Research UK.

The music is provided by The Invisible Festival as playlists on Spotify. The event wouldn’t be happening without Spotify which as a service has to be seen to be believed. See Lifehacker Spotify article for glowing review. Spotify has 3.8 million tracks available for streaming, for free. Its like iTunes without the shopping cart.

Similarly, without the Invisible Festival I wouldn’t be a Spotify user. Its ridiculous but I just didn’t realise how great it was going to be even though people have been raving about it. And its a nice smug feeling that the UK is one of the first countries to get access to the service.

Spotify and Invisible Festival made the best festival of 2009!