One of the boons of my current more... independent workstyle is the time to walk along Shoreham Beach in the afternoons, enjoying the raw beauty of nature.
Recently in Life Category
Been a little quiet around here, hasn't it?
2012: time on my hands, money in the bank - surely my blogging should have shot through the roof? And that was, indeed, the theory I had. But instead, I've been following the patented Adders Plan Diet for dealing with your festive weight-gain:
- Get very ill on Boxing Day evening
- Spend the next 10 days continuing to be very ill
- Barely eat for the majority of that time
The pounds just fall off, I can tell you. You also end up exhausted, a little shaky, and somewhat scared of food. But hey, no pain, no gain.
Thankfully, for the last 48 hours or so I've been eating normally again, and have got much of my strength back. However, at least one pair of jeans now look like comedy clown trousers when I put them on…
Which is a rather long-winded way of saying: normal blogging service resumes now.
And so, another year ends in this festive season. I'm facing a 2012 with more uncertainty than I think I've known in over a decade, but with uncertainty comes possibility and with possibility comes the chance of something great...
So I'm relaxing with family, cooking a huge turkey, and looking forward to presents and whisky later on.
Thank you all so much for reading OM&HB this year. There's a festive message, a review of the year, some "missing posts" and a list of the most popular posts of the year to come over the next week or so.
I hope you have a great Christmas, if that's your thing, or a happy holiday period if it's not. Best wishes to you all.
Yesterday, I returned from my best holiday in years, refreshed, revitalised and ready for the challenges ahead. Our blog platform needed revamping, there was a ton of mobile strategy work to be done, we needed to brainstorm easy win funnel content for one of our magazines, we needed to press on with our new comments system...
...and the company politely informed me that I wouldn't be doing any of this, and, indeed, my employment would most likely be coming to an end. The normal discussions are underway as to possible alternative roles, but the chances are that sometime soon I'll be looking for new employment. I won't deny that I'm sad about this - the last five years have been the happiest of my working life. But times change, things move on, and in a sense, I predicted my own redundancy. I've long argued that one of the things that publishing businesses need to do to stay competitive in the new era was reduce the burden of central costs. Somehow, I never quite saw myself as one of those burdens, until I was reduced... ;-)
I hope that new opportunities will open up for me. I'm one of a limited pool of people with half a decade's experience in transforming content businesses, through a mix of technology, training, mentoring and outright evangelism, and I'm confident there's someone out there who will find those skills useful.
So, if you need someone with any of these skills:
- 10 years' experience of blogging
- 5 years' experience of training journalists and industry figures in all forms of social media and digital journalism
- Extensive work on content strategies, especially the role of journalism and social media in funnel marketing
- General publishing strategy
- Online profile building
- Particularly skilled in liveblogging
- Recent deep work on mobile strategies and propositions
- Editorial technology research, acquisition and deployment
...feel free to drop me a line on adam@tinworth.org
I'm refreshed, revitalised and ready to bring my skills to bear on new projects...
...back soon, rested and refreshed. :-)
I think it's possible that my colleagues have twigged that it was my 40th yesterday...
And this is, I feel, true:
Help me. I'm old... ;-)
A decade ago, almost exactly, I pressed publish on my very first ever blog post, entitled "Falling Towards 30", and sat in quiet amazement in my study in Lewisham. I'd pressed "publish", and the post was live. Just like that. No HTML editing. No teams of editors to approve it. No waiting for the twice-a-day "publish". My words were there, on the web, as easily as that. It wasn't the first time I'd published to the web; indeed, I'd had websites of various forms for probably 5 years at that point. But this was something different. The sheer ease of the Livejournal interface, the comments that opened up at the bottom of the page, the speed of publication. These were all new to me. All of a sudden, web publishing had moved from a techie pursuit to anyone with access to a service like Livejournal, or Blogger, or the brand new Movable Type. I pressed publish. I looked at the post. And then I got up and spent the afternoon tidying up the flat, ready for the arrival of my girlfriend. We were off to see the fireworks on Blackheath, which you can see above. And I had no clue that my life had just changed forever.
Within five years of that day, I'd be working full-time in blogging. I'd have attended one of the earliest political blogging events in the UK, and chronicled the day terrorists hit London. I've got engaged and married. I nursed my mother through cancer and death. And a hundred other ideas and discussions and conferences and events, and vast blog controversies. It has been one hell of a decade.
And yet, it's easy to forget in these days of Twitter and Facebook and all the other services that make some form of personal online publishing so trivial to do just how revolutionary this all felt back at the beginning of the century. While certain forms of social software had been around for a while even in the late 90s - Usenet, bulletin boards, forums - blogging opened up a new form of "owned" site and the combination of the permalink and the comments beneath brought a new form of distributed conversation to the web. This sang to me back then. I was chafing under the bondage of traditional forms of journalism, the impersonal language, the inherent distance from the audience, the lack of control a minor section editor had over what appeared in print each day. On the blog, my work lived and died purely on my own choices, my own merits and that of the work I created. And that was addictive. Was? Is. The launch of this blog was still a good 18 months away, but I stand by the name of it. There's something pure and visceral about one man writing one blog, determining the content through his own preferences and choices, and expressing it in his own voice. All the most successful blogs I've been involved with in the latter half of the decade have followed that model - one person expressing their passion through their personal means of expression - even if they've evolved into more of a group format later.
Many people will never need a blog now. The idea of one man, one blog has been superseded by Twitter (I'll hit five years on that next month...) and Facebook and other forms of more accessible social media. Compared to them, blogging is hard work. But for those of us who like to express ourselves in long form content and annotated quotes and links, there's nothing quite like a blog. One man, one blog, my blog.
And now I'm sat writing this, nearly a decade later (I'm cheating by writing this the night before...) in my front room in Shoreham. The computer and the software I'm typing into would be a revelation to my younger self. But I'm still here, still blogging, even as I fall towards my 40th birthday. I'm better at it (I hope...), and certainly less tentative. But I'm still as enthusiastic about it as ever. There's still a buzz, a certain magic, in pressing that publish button and in letting your thoughts and ideas join in that vast global conversation. It might be a bigger conversation now, and noisier, and harder to make yourself heard in. But it's there, and it's happening and it sure ain't going away.
I may be falling towards 40, but I sincerely hope - and believe - that I'll still be blogging in some form or another as I'm falling towards 50.
Thanks for reading, especially that tiny handful of you out there from the Livejournal days who read that very first post of my when it hit the web.
It has been a week of changes, which is one of the reasons for my silence on the blog. The big change came on Monday, when we finally completed the sale of the flat I've lived in for the last decade and a half. For a short while, I am no longer a property owner. Instead, I'm a happily renting with my wife in a town on the south coast, and positively relishing not having a home in London for the first time since, as far as I can recall, 1990. After two decades I am officially no longer a Londoner. And yet, I'm not tired of life. ;-)And that means some changes for this blog. During 2004 and 2005, this blog was often focused on Lewisham and its surrounds. That phase has long passed, and apart from some recent quick flings with my past, it's not coming back. This blog is now firmly around the intersection of journalism, social media and technology, and I have other places for other subjects. Most particularly:
- General personal blogging lives at The Rest of my Life
- Blogging about my local area lives at Shoreham Life
And there's assorted other stuff, too, but those are the blogs that have inherited what were once parts of this blog's remit. So feed free to dump this feed if you don't care about journalism/social media/technology and pick up one of the others instead...
And, as the week was already one of adapting to change, I made the decision to change the software running this blog. The last time I mentioned this, I was choosing between Movable Type 5, Melody and WordPress. I dismissed WordPress first. Although I create the majority of new blogs I set up on the platform, the effort of migrating the 3000+ entries on this blog, plus all the assets, and then getting the URLs all lined up just didn't seem worth the benefits I'd get. Melody fell next - I like and respect what the team behind it are doing, but they haven't yet persuaded me that they're in it for the long-haul. Perhaps if version 1.1 was out by now, I might have chosen differently. But it isn't, and I didn't.
And so, this blog continues its eight year history on Movable Type, finally hitting version 5 with this software upgrade. (5.12 for the pedants).
A new start this week, on lots of levels. And lots of stuff to talk about. Onwards, to the future... ;-)
10 years ago today, I lost my Dad. That's him with me back in 2001 in the top picture, and as a much younger man in 1966 in the bottom one. A handful of days after 9/11, cancer took him from us, and my view of the world was turned upside down again. And I couldn't let the day pass without noting it (and I wrote about him earlier in the year, on Father's Day).
There's a third "decade" anniversary to come in a few weeks. And it's a much happier one...
