Alongside the main Shift-Time Festival we're running a project to get Shrewsbury and the surrounding area blogging. We want people to use the festival to experiment with all sorts of "social media" services be they weblogs, photo and video sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube or Twitter. The end result, we hope, is to give Shrewsbury the tools to talk to itself about things that matter, whatever they may be.

This blog will act as a hub, collecting and linking to online activity that is either relevant to the festival or Shrewsbury in general, and posting things to to help and inspire you to blog about Shift-Time.

So get involved by setting up a blog or sharing your photos and videos online and let us know what you're up to so we can mention it on the blog.

Support for Shift-Time bloggers over Twitter

Part of my role in the Shift-Time blogging project is to help nascent bloggers and such to do what they want to do. This stuff is easy but sometimes you need a nudge in the right direction. While the surgeries we’ve been running have been great they’re only useful if you have a question ready and can be at the Hive at the right time. The Internet is supposed to solve that sort of thing so here’s a possible solution.

If you’re using Twitter you can ask me stuff. Simply prefix your message with @askpeteashton and I’ll answer it through my Ask Pete Ashton account.

The idea is it’ll force you to break your question down to the essentials and because I’m unable to ramble on and on I’m more likely to answer you in a timely manner. 140 characters have their advantages.

If it turns out to be a bigger question and if I have the time I’ll get in touch for a more detailed answer. But I’m hoping most of it can be dealt with here.

This isn’t an exclusive service for Shift-Time but if you mention the festival I’ll prioritise your tweet, as it were.

I wrote more about the service on my ASH-10 blog.