Twestival Nashville

Well, Twestival Nashville will get underway in a few hours and I just hung up the phone with one of the local organizers and 2006 Belmont alum, Morgan Levy. Just by hearing her voice, you know, Levy is capable, competent and committed. She and her roommate, another Belmont alum (2008) Christy Frink have organized the event to be held here today from 5-8 at the Big Bang Theory at 411 Broadway Avenue. This fundraiser is a nationwide deal through Twitter to benefit Charity: Water, an international group that creates wells all over the world. The national goal is to raise $1M. Locally, Morgan says they hope to raise $3-4K. It costs 10 bucks and sound like it will be a lot of fun. And it only took them 10 days to make it happen. The two were embarrassed that no Tennessee cities were originally going to sponsor an event. Now Nashville is among more than 100 ciites involved in the fundraiser. They have 100 people registered and expect between 2-300 people. This just shows the power of social media once again.

Beyond that, the conversation was fascinating and inspiring. Levy says she and Frink started their blog, Nashvillest when both were laid off. Frink got the idea while spending the summer in DC and following a similar blog there. They aren't making money yet, but they enjoy doing the blog. Frink does the news updates each morning while Levy goes through 200 different national sources to gather news and information. (Who says young people don't consume information on the web, Levy is 22.) When they redo the website, they plan to have more powerful platform to support ads and other revenue generation tools. Levy says they get more than a thousand hits a day. Levy says food posts are really popular.

And, they take full advantage of the network economy and let the audience tell them what to write. Levy says,

"You want to write what people WANT to read about."

Morgan also told me about some local blogs to check out: News Coma, Tiny Cat Pants and Dave Made That.