This may be a niché post for some, but it’s a very interesting one to say the least. As most of you may know, it’s November and the internet is full of memes. What does the latest one have to do? Well, a long standing meme called National Novel Writing Month is under way throughout the month of November and I am finally participating in it. So what is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo? Read on through for more info.

The concept is to essentially make fun of novel writers and how much time they take when writing is their profession. Some may think it’s a novel idea (pun absolutely intended), but it’s actually brilliant. Many people have a creative side to them but they rarely have the opportunity to tap into it. NaNoWriMo is among the best ways to tap into this.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is to help people tap into their creativity side of their mind. By proposing a challenge of writing a 50,000 word, members have something to shoot for (1,667 words per day on average). So where does the tech part in this come in?

2009 is the best year to join so far. People can meet others on Twitter, Facebook, Google Wave, or whatever collaboration software such as Kohive. With all these tools, you can easily share ideas for the novel, get help if you have writer’s block, or just want people to read over your passages.

Now, the software to write this can range from free to expensive. However much you want to spend, you can find something that suits you. You can use Microsoft Word if you already have it, Pages on OS X, TextEdit on OS X or Notepad/Wordpad on Windows. However, there are special programs like Hogbay Software’s WriteRoom. WriteRoom is $25 but definitely worth it if you like having no distractions on screen.

Basically, WriteRoom will set your screen with a solid color of your choice (black by default) and text color (green by default, retro style). From there, you can do nothing but write. Of course, you can have it set to be a window like TextEdit but I prefer the full-screen editing as there is no other distractions.

As mentioned, WriteRoom is $25 but for the next week (until November 12), WriteRoom is free with the MacHeist IV nanoBundle along with five other apps and I highly recommend it if you are writing for NaNoWriMo or a research paper (or both like me).

Good luck to those who participate! And for those who are just now joining, you are approximately 8,335 words behind. Get to work.

Editor’s Note: Grant Bell (founder of Tomorrow’s Web) is the co-founder of Kohive.com

Need a collaboration tool and Google Wave isn’t powerful enough? Perhaps a more likely scenario of not having a Google Wave invite is your issue? Then Kohive is a very worthy alternative. And it’s not just for boring online projects to collaborate on, oh no. It has far more uses than that.

First off, Kohive is like a mini-website inside itself. It has a message board function, blog, chat, and a microblog (ala Twitter) to round its communication tools out. There is also a video and photo “app” to run inside it. Yes, I said “app” because the entire site is essentially an application (or to a certain extent, an operating system) running inside a browser. This is by no means something brand new, but it’s nice to see something like this put to good use.

Microsoft’s… I guess we must say “competitor” to the iPod touch has been released after having details out about it for months. The Zune HD is their new pride and joy (as it’s the only Zune device featured on the main page) and they look to have a winner. It has a clean interface, 16×9 screen resolution, WiFi, and biggest of all: HD playback in the forms of HD content and HD Radio. Unfortunately, it has one downside: the “Zune” name.