First off, I’ve narrowed down my blog into four areas: Lifestyle, Media, News and the Shoreditch Twit. This means that I have some direction on what I want to write about. So Lifestyle will include music, films, fashion and entertainment; Media will be thoughts on old and new media and technologies, News might contain thoughts on world events and politics, and the last one is pretty self-explanatory.

What this means is that I need content to write about, so while I’m more than happy to go off and find my own stories, I’m very grateful to people who consider my little blog to be worth their time and effort in letting me know what they are up to.

I’ve also added a little video module in the footer – while I don’t create that much video, this is a Vimeo widget that simply lists my favourite stuff on there. Please do send me any links of clips that you think I might like.

Finally, one thing that will stay the same is the random pictures which have no apparent connection to the blog post – this one’s kind of easyI think, so stick your answers in the comments as usual, as well as any other comments you have about the new site.

Anyway, I also do appreciate the emails I get letting me know about cool new stuff to write about – even if I’ve not posted anything yet, I’m sure I’ll get around to it when the time comes (Chris, Yuri, Alex are first in my showing love queue!)

First blogger steps
My first blog was about a three month career break during which I came to the realisation that I wanted to work in social media or digital PR or web 2.0 or whatever we were calling it back then. I didn’t want to send a circular email, so I blogged about my time away from work, which was spent learning Spanish, reading, and volunteering in the Dominican Republic. Dominicans can be a pretty inspirational bunch, and whenever I read it back to myself, it reminds me of how I was feeling at the time. I like to blog about people, even if I’m writing about tech, I want to think about how it affects people.

For blogging’s sake
My next step was a Tumblr page that I wanted to be about interesting things I found on the web, finding inspiration from what others were creating, especially pictures. It ended up being pictures, blog posts, news stories, and quotes from Overheard in New York. All well and good, but not particularly inspiring or well maintained (My twitter feed still ends up being replicated there!). It was superseded after a few months by this blog.

So what?
Quite. It’s still about people, I try to blog about people, for people, but sometimes get it wrong. This is a professional blog (to some extent)… I work in social media PR and have to continually understand what it means to be both an individual and an online publisher (no matter how small) and having my own blog helps me do that. I’d like to blog more, and maybe I’ll make that a resolution for 2009.  

So that’s me done, and in the time-honoured meme tradition, I’m tagging Adam, Ashley, and Amanda - alliteration rocks. Oh, and here’s some other places you can read other answers to the same question.

I’ve just got back from New York – an entirely non-work focused trip – and was struck by something while I was out there. Normal people in NYC read blogs… and not just occasionally. I’m blessed to have a number of friends in the city, so I manage to spend time there not being a tourist, but generally spending lots of money at nice restuarants, having nice conversations, with nice New Yorkers. At one such restaurant, in one such conversation, with some such people, popular US blogs Gawker, DListed, Gothamist, and Defamer were all mentioned in quick succession.

I noted that this wouldn’t happen in London with a large percentage of my friends. Someone pointed out that New Yorkers are more naturally suited to blogs. They like the exclusivity, the snarky writing style, the fact they get information before mainstream media. It reflects how they are as people.

Not sure there’s anything anthropological about that… just an observation.

I was going to post about the blogger meetup yesterday, but I was out partying with these people - one of whom is a BB9 “competitor” with a deal to promote men’s make-up.. (he was wearing guyliner). Company Magazine’s 30th Birthday party isn’t exaclty social media, but it was free drinks, massages and a whole host of beautiful people – so with an invite courtesy of Melanie Seasons, I couldn’t turn it down.

So this week did see the latest in a long line of ever growing Blogger Meetups in London. Run by Andy Bargery, this month’s event was courtesy of Smirnoff Vodka (via Rax at Splendid). The meetup was hosted at the Diageo bar and was hailed universally as a successful meetup and a genius piece of blogger relations.

After being treated to several Moscow Mules, each blogger was then taken through the process of creating their own tailored cocktail which had been specially created by mixologists based on the content and personality of the blog such as the Ice Cream 4 Everyone cocktail.

So why is this so great? Well it’s really well thought through (not just free drinks), it’s personalised (the though that went into individual cocktails was really impressive and shows real investment in each blogger), it shows us something that we don’t know much about, and it makes a perfect excuse for an in depth blog post.

It probably won’t make me change my vodka order, but bags of kudos to the team for organising it – hopefully more brands will see the value of this type of activity with bloggers… already there are posts out there, so it’s good to see folk I caught up with there writing in agreement. 

Here are some other write-ups and pics from Lolly, Melanie, Willem, Annie Mole, Hayley and Yael (love the NYC crew!)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOnjMusOBfs]

The lovely Artois people also held a competition to win one of its exclusive rides in its Star Over London airship – which I saw from a train yesterday evening – as part of its love your local campaign. My entry (about how “local” is a social term rather than a geographical one) was fortunate enough to win one of these highly coveted trips, but unfortunately, I’m unable to make the scheduled time. So in order to ensure that the wonderful experience is still hosted on social PRobiotic, I have given it away to the lovely JK who has agreed to write a guest post for me. She’ll be flying over London tomorrow evening, so check out her Twitter page for updates. Then drop back here next week to get her experience of the trip.

Great to see old faces and meet new ones including The Londoneer, LJRich and Xavier - go check ‘em out as well as Annie Mole’s write-up and pictures from the London Bloggers event.

- “Great! we’ve been expecting that”

- “So it does… wait…. you can?…. hang on… say that again.”

The fun behind launch was mainly due to the fact that we were talking about a really cool product, and secondly the team behind it was full of enthusiasm and placed a massive amount of value on PR, both traditional and working with bloggers. At that time, the UK blogging scene was pretty nascent, and actually having a client place value on outreach to this unknown quantity was a refreshing change and part of my migration towards working in social media.

For those of you who don’t know, The Slingbox is a device which allows you to watch your own TV from anywhere you have an internet connection, whether that’s on your laptop in a wi-fi enabled cafe or via 3G on your mobile.

The launch was probably ahead of its time -  these days, there are tens more gadget blogs to talk to about great new products. What’s more, the Slingbox story is much more complete. They’ve brought out more products, taken HD and mobile into account and continue to support more devices to “sling” around the world, such as Apple TV and the XBox 360. Add to this the fact that in the UK, we’re only just getting into internet-anywhere culture, with most recent phones (such as the Nokia N95 I’ve recently acquired) being built with web-enabled applications in mind.

So whilst it’s a product that has been around for a while, only now am I convinced of the full value of buying one (or getting one for free – as in my case). There are more accessible broadband points out there, more enabled devices and we’re just so much more connected than even two years ago. It’s still a little tricky to set up even with the most popular home routers, but I can forgive that. I wish the team luck with future launches, but I think there’s still a story to be told as the basic concept becomes that much more available to the mainstream audience.

But today’s shock-blogging story emanates from research from the University of Washington which reports that 36 bloggers were arrested in 2007 around the world – three times as many as 2006.

As reported here, bloggers writing about political controversies in their countries have been arrested by governments for exposing corruption, reporting on the abuse of human rights, and blogging about political figures. The BBC notes that the actual number of blogger arrests could be far higher than this, as for many cases it’s hard to deduce if and why an arrest has taken place.

While the story demonstrates that blogs are feeding the democratisation of publishing, it also shows that there will always be those who want to maintain the old-school way of control, where information monopolies restrict the transparency and openness that the social media revolution has come to embody.

First written for Shiny Red.