TWiSmageddon Celebration Hangout

No story update tonight, I've been getting stuff done in real life in preparation for tomorrow/tonight's TWiSmageddon Google+ Hangout.

The idea of the hangout is that the hosts of This Week in Science (Dr. Kiki Sanford, Justin Jackson, Blair Bazdarich) will be doing a live hangout on G+ for 21 straight hours, talking about science and other cool stuff and confirming in each time zone that yes, indeed, the world hasn't ended and no, there's no sign of a giant wall of fire or some other cataclysm that might herald the end of the world as we know it.

There're going to be lots of people taking part, including myself and many other TWiS chat room participants, but also including such notable luminaries as The Sword & Laser's Tom Merritt, Dr. Carin Bondar, Joanne Manaster, and possible/unconfirmed other notables like Andy Ihnatko and the Frogpants Network's Scott Johnson.

Naturally, I'm a little freaked out at the prospect of being on camera for this thing, being both a sufferer of social anxiety and being a bit camera-phobic, but I've survived various GeekBeat.TV hangouts and being on The Sword & Laser's video show briefly, so I'm sure I'll survive this too.

Full details about the event can be found at the TWiSmageddon Event on Google+.

Google+ Hangouts and Editing

A lot of my planned working time was taken up unexpectedly tonight by a really fantastic Google+ hangout. Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer of Discovery.com) and several other astronomers were aiming a telescope at the sky and looking at the moon, at Saturn and several of its moons, and at several constellations in real-time online. It was fascinating, and inspiring.

It made me start to think about other uses for hangouts. I know writers have taken to doing writing hangouts, which I haven’t tried yet. Has anyone tried an editing hangout? It could be done as part fiction reading, part suggestion/critique/workshopping. It seems like that could be an interesting way to take advantage of the technology, as well as solve some of the issues I was having conceptually with editing in public.

I’ll have to put the idea out there on Google+ in particular, see what users there think. If you’re on Google+ and would be interested in something like that, add me to your circles and let me know.