Between my nine Twitter accounts (don’t ask – I rarely even visit the site) I’m made aware of some ingenious uses of the platform – none more so than @tweetamanchestercab, which started following @rainycitystories yesterday:

We are a collective group of cab companies operating in Manchester United Kingdom. Follower our group and next time you need a cab tweet us

What a great little idea. If I didn’t live on Europe’s busiest bus route I’d be tempted to try it out.

Has anyone else spotted any fun or innovative Twittering in Manchester?

Nope, this isn’t a national version of Risk. Cube gallery and the Redeye photography network (plus Marketing Manchester and DLA Piper) want you to capture the city in the photographic sense.

The incentive is one of 10 awards of £500 (one of which will be decided by the People), plus the chance to have your images displayed in Cube on Portland Street from 28 March until 9 April. In fact, every submitted image – ‘so long as it’s legal and decent’ (in terms of quality or nakedness, I wonder) – will be exhibited, which is a great extra incentive to enter. You’ve only got one entry though so don’t waste it.

The 10 winners will also have their photographs reproduced and distributed throughout the city as postcards, and they’ll receive limited edition prints in a commemorative book.

The competition’s open to both professionals and non-professionals, and the deadline’s fast approaching: Friday 20 February. See the Capture Manchester website for full details.

[Hat-tip to How-Do]

A couple of months ago Visit Manchester, the city’s official tourism website, launched HearManchester.com, a 10-part audio guide to the Rochdale Canal and Petersfield.

Presented by John Robb, the downloadable and streamable guides are entitled inspired, green, en-route, underground, unsung (which I found most interesting), radical, poetic, human, proud and industrial. Each part includes interviews with local experts – ‘ranging from city councillors to body-poppers, psychogeographers to popstars’ – and has a PDF transcript and an associated map, highlighting some of the main points of interest.

The individual guides have a physical trailmarker (such as the one pictured and this one) to encourage people to website, and the project is being promoted as part of next week’s Manchester Science Festival. The guide, produced by Northern Quarter digital agency StarDotStar, has also been shortlisted for a BIMA Award.

You may have already read about it, but today Kate Manchizzle and I launch a website we’ve been working together on: Rainy City Stories. It’s been fun flexing my web developing muscles on something creative and Manc-centric, and we’re both happy with what we’ve produced:

We’ve created an interactive literary cityscape that enables you to click on a location in Manchester and read a story or poem set there. To start the project off we’re commissioning site-specific stories from some of the area’s most exciting established writers, but you can tell us your own story too.

There are already four stories up from these commissioned writers – Nicholas Royle, Rajeev Balasubramanyam, Mike Duff and Jackie Kay – and they’re based around a good spread of locations: Moss Nook, Chorlton, Victoria Station and Whalley Range.

We’ve also had several submissions from the public, which’ll be going up very soon too. While it’s been mostly short stories so far, we’re also hoping for plenty of poetry submissions – and maybe even some multimedia stuff (photo stories, comic strips, audio, video etc). Click here to submit your own story to the map.

There’ll be more commissioned work added to Rainy City Stories in 2009, plus workshops and live lit events. If you’re interested in receiving updates about these – and in reading new Mancunian literature – please subscribe via RSS, email or Twitter.

Rainy City Stories is part of the Manchester Literature Festival, which begins next Thursday, and is supported by Arts Council England. I’d really appreciate any feedback, either as a comment here or on the RCS site itself.