Fiona Cullinan » Misc

Photo School, Friday School and Social Media Group Therapy

Fiona Cullinan — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:24:01 +0000

This is obviously the Year of the School. Firstly, there’s my moveable cake-fuelled feast of learning, the Friday School, while over on the other office sofa, Pete has just launched Matt and Pete’s Photo School.

Photo School is a monthly ‘photo club’, that’s also designed to combine learning with fun. It is based in Birmingham and the idea is to learn more about your camera, the art of photography and how to improve your picture-taking skills both in and out of the classroom. It is all but sold out for the launch session this Sunday but there is more to come in March so book ahead to reserve your spot – here’s the flyer:

Busy Pete has been busy – he has also set up Social Media Group Therapy, which is a great format for sharing and solving problems. I’ll be assisting at the first two-hour therapy session, which will take place at Moseley Exchange on 6 March.

Also on the learning theme, both of us will be taking part on a panel at the University of Wolverhamption this week. Now that everyone is a publisher, we’ll be discussing the new world of publishing and social media jobs with students on the Creative and Professional Writing degree. Author and lecturer Candi Miller will be moderating.

Welcome to Friday school (or how I developed my own freelance training programme)

Fiona Cullinan — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:55:33 +0000

UPDATE: I’ve blogged a fuller version of this as a guest post on Firehead.net if you want to know more: How I teach myself digital skills using cake!

I have a reputation for getting stuff done. This is probably because I’m a lists person. At this point I want to recommend Workflowy as a ‘lists with benefits’ free app. Not only can you create lists and endless sublists, but you can tag the tasks by priority or date (using hashtags) and assign the work using the @name function. Best of all, you can share and collaborate on a list and export it for use with other programmes.

But enough of the glowing review. Above is my personal training list for January. This is part of my idea to set up my own personal Friday School.

Every Friday, for half a day, I take myself off to a café with wifi, treat myself to brunch, lunch or coffee and cake, and sit down to learn.

My list of stuff to learn for my work is long but here is the overview.

Clicking onto any of these titles then displays a breakdown of chapter titles, video presentations to watch, links to read, tutorials to view, etc. I estimate there is about a school year’s worth of work here.

To help cope with that and not give up at the first instance, I’ve tagged about four Fridays worth of work with the hashtag #january. Clicking on this brings up a much more manageable list and, as you can see, I’m nearly done. Anything that’s left over, I’ll just retag to #february so I don’t stress about not getting it all done to a deadline. I am trying to make my learning fun and not a pressure.

So what did I learn in January 2012?

The best part of the Google SEO guide. No snake oil just straightforward ways to make sure content is findable by readers.
How much corporate blogging overlaps with journalism skills.
Digital video content tricks to take my video efforts to the next level.
Storytelling techniques from Hollywood.
And today I did my first bit of coding using Ruby, using a free ebook in progress called the Bastards Book of Ruby – an amazing free resource, written by a hack not a hacker, so very easy to follow.

Here is my first bit of coding – I has a proud, as you can see:

Uploaded with Skitch!

So, enough. Roll on #february – I finally have some web analytics training lined up, which I’ve been trying to get around to for 18 months now.

How do you learn your chops?

Following the North Cotswold Hunt 2012

Fiona Cullinan — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:36:14 +0000

Being in the Cotswolds at the start of the new year has been lovely and surprisingly mild and sunny. Today we happened on the North Cotswold Hunt – no longer of foxes but of a scented trail laid down just ahead of the hunt by a set of runners on all-terrain quad bikes. I caught the start on video, setting out from the Lygon Arms in Chipping Campden and we were lucky enough to bump into them again on a cross-country walk to Blockley. In a rather working class, urban way, I stared agog at it all: the hound pack, beautiful horses, clopping of hooves and the vivid scarlet jackets. I’m afraid I was quite impressed.

Happy new year – and 2011 in links

Fiona Cullinan — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:01:21 +0000

Looking back at 2011, I can’t seem to recall much of what happened; a symptom of getting older perhaps? But I think it was a fairly positive one. According to my work diary and various blogs, these were some of the highlights:

January: Hired for Content Strategy Applied conference as a social reporter. Producing social and multimedia content for some of the world’s leading content experts was slightly scary. Not quite as challenging as joining a hula hoop club in the same month, though. Also, delivered my first content strategy report for a client. Only 30 pages long…

February: The opera I’d had a bit part in was screened on BBC2. Was so excited I ringed all my appearances and blogged them.

March: Put in an offer on a house. Over five months later, I finally got the keys. Took up djembe, which was taking place in the next room over from hula hooping.

April: Desperate for a holiday but busy with work so ended up on three weekend breaks to: the Cotswolds, Liverpool and Ironbridge.

May: Represented Moldova at a Eurovision party. This involved wearing a giant pointy hat and bumping into doorways a lot. In other musical news, I got to rehearse with the ukenauts of Moselele at Highbury Recording Studio, where Duran Duran recorded a demo. On the work front, I had a eureka moment of realising what it is that I do.

June: Celebrated two years blog-editing for Grant Thornton UK and one year blogging for Firehead. These are the people who keep me in tea and biscuits. See Blogs for more info on work goings-on.

July: Annual holiday, this time down to Llangollen in Wales for a barge break followed by a beachy, family week on the Isle of Purbeck in sunny Dorzet.

August: Went to my first Hacks and Hackers meet in central Birmingham and learned to scrape data and create dataviz. Here are my first attempts. Also, went to my first Brighton Mod Weekender; tried/failed to do the funny northern soul dance.

September: Photographed many events, such as the Moseley Folk Festival and the long-closed-down Stirchley Swimming Baths where I learnt to swim. The big news was having my 25-year fear of flying cured in just two sessions of hypnotherapy, ready for…

October: … a learn-to-scuba dive press trip in Grenada. Awesome!

November: Bought tickets to a sporting event for the first time: the World Tumbling and Trampolining Championships. Which was cool but hard to photograph. But that was only the start of quite a random weekend…

December: Tried hard not to be ill for the third Christmas running – and failed. Being laid up with the sniffles has led to redoing this website and planning some exciting work changes in 2012.

Until then I wish you all a very

Happy New Year!

A weekend featuring various artists

Fiona Cullinan — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:26:33 +0000

I don’t often write diary posts but sometimes a weekend is so full on, it’s a way to offload stuff and think about them later. So here’s the rather strange collection of activities and oddities that Birmingham presented this weekend.

FRIDAY: Trampolines and New Romantics

1. The 28th Trampoline and Tumbling World Championship, NIA
I’ve never paid to go to a sporting event before but I was fascinated to see what the world’s best offered in terms of sports that basically involved jumping, bouncing and general boinging.

I’d completed a 12-week beginners trampoline course last year in which someone was stretchered off by paramedics in week 1 so I knew it would be nerve-wracking. It was also a challenge on the photographic front with fast-moving athletes against the busy background of a crowd. Suffice it to say, the athletes were incredible, the vibe slightly strange – more on that in Pete’s post – and my snaps quite blurry. Here are a couple of the ones that worked and also some lo-fi phone video of two trampoline routines. Just look at how high they jump!

2. Only After Dark, Air
I go to nightclubs about as often as I go to sporting events. Amusingly, as the trampoline event above finished as 9pm, I had to go to the NIA dressed up (something like this lot) ready to go straight on to ‘ONLY AFTER DARK – a monthly club at Air Nightclub, Birmingham night based on the Bowie nights of the late 70s/early 80s’. The DJ line-up featured Rusty Egan from the famous Blitz Club in London, and DJ Dick from the Rum Runner, where Duran Duran first kicked into life. I was happy because my chum came up from London and because they played four hours of music I recognised and wanted to dance to – including my favourite B-side: Hard Times by The Human League. Spot the DJ in this phone snap…

And here I am courtesy of birthday girl Bev Hislop:

SATURDAY: Vampires and glitches

3. Breaking Dawn Part 2, The Electric Cinema
The final (sort of) movie instalment of the Twilight series, described by various friends as romantic crack for teenage girls up to middle-aged woman. The films are becoming more fun to watch as they take themselves less seriously and deliver the lines with more camp. How else can you deal with a love triangle between a schoolgirl, vampire and werewolf? This one featured rather grim scenes – pregnant women are advised to avoid. Being able to drink wine at The Electric, our lovely indie cinema in central Brum, helped.

4. GLI.TC/H 20111, Vivid
Popped in to a festival celebrating something I’m not sure I can articulate. But then that’s what Wikipedia is for:

“A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. It is often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, and in circuit bending, as well as among players of video games, although it is applied to all types of systems including human organizations and nature.”

I have friends who do this stuff and make art/sound/visuals out of it. I do not pretend to understand but I do enjoy, and was amused when a Brazilian glitch artist at the festival told his audience how his film was switched off by the projectionist after a minute because he thought it was just that – a glitch.

SUNDAY: Opera and doom tuba

5. Birmingham Opera Company open day, AE Harris factory
Having joined the amazing Birmingham Opera Co’s last two productions (and blogged about the experience: Othello and The Wedding), I was interested to see what their next brand new opera production was all about. Life Is A Dream begins rehearsing in January for performance in March. It’s a newly commissioned opera by Jonathan Dove to celebrate artistic director Graham Vick’s 25 years of working with the company in Birmingham. It’ll be performed back in the industrial warehouse where Othello was performed (see below) and will apparently feature a dream-like maze for the audience to walk about in. Expect the extraordinary.

6. The Sound of Birmingham, Ikon Gallery
I’m not going to make this (after a loooong weekend) but at the Ikon Gallery tonight will be the sound of Birmingham’s industrial metal heritage – in the form of Lash Frenzy, Ore and SoundKitchen. Lash Frenzy blew me away last time I saw them – featuring a 40-minute sonic storm and lightshow assault akin to standing in front of a jet engine and during which I had the emotion wrung from me in the form of tears. This time they will perform a work based around the first three notes only of the song ‘Black Sabbath’. Ore, meanwhile, feature a friend Sam Underwood who took up the tuba earlier this year for the first time to play in a ‘drone doom tuba group’. Doomba? It’s noise as an artform. Here’s a taster. See how long you last…

Coda: Sam, together with Ms Hypnotique, also provided the soundtrack for Hackybeanpouffe – a rather fun game Pete and I invented for those bored people with a floor cushion and no dust allergies.

Astley Book Farm sexy book haul

Fiona Cullinan — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 23:10:45 +0000

Back in March, I visited the ‘largest secondhand book shop in the Midlands‘ – a converted farm somewhere in the middle of the Warwickshire countryside – and came back with a bumper crop of books. Today Pete and I went for a top-up trip. I spent £2 on four books from the Ten Bob Barn section:

1. Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez
‘One of the most celebrated novels to come out of Latin America in decades.’ And ‘an insane journey into the condemned soul of a sexual deviant’. I was obviously looking for saucy reads because I also bought a copy of…

2. The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl: What Belle Did Next
I haven’t read the first Belle de Jour book, or her blog, but I’m imagining the content is much the same.

3. Bliss In Bali by J Chegaray
Any books on Bali are ‘a goer’ in my world. This one is a travelogue from 1955, when access was not easily granted, and where the writer discovers an island of taboos.

4. Odd Jobs: Portraits of Unusual Occupations by Nancy Rica Shiff
A photo-essay book featuring the kind of jobs careers advisors don’t tell you about, including – to continue the saucy theme – condom tester, breast measurer, artificial inseminator, foot model, semen collector, cross-dressing headmistress and colonics therapist.

That’s my reading sorted for summer then.

Oh and book number five was a gift from Pete: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides – “a transatlantic epic”. Apparently I’ll enjoy it. Hmm.

News from my blogs

Fiona Cullinan — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 16:06:29 +0000

Having different blogs for different subject areas means that I am a slave to them all. So if it’s quiet here on my central hub then it’s probably because I’m over on one of my other workday or spare-time blogs. As a quick roundup, here’s what I’ve been posting elsewhere of late:

31 Destinations in Time – because it’s not just about the place but the era in which you visit it. I’ve just posted number 11 in the series on Dumaguete City, capital of Negros Island, in the Philippines in 2007. The series also includes Bali, Iceland, Venice, Jordan, Slovenia, Paris, Gili Trawangan, Austin, Texas and San Francisco.

Subs’ Standards – lately in my sub-editing blog I’ve been picking up on a few funnies that have made it through to publication. I also published my first guest post – from multimedia journalist Andy Bull on the subs-friendly art of curation and live-blogging. I’m now thinking of asking other sub-editors to write about their experiences of digital subbing.

Debauched Teddies – rounding up bad teddy bears from around the world. There are LOTS.

Katchooo Mix – a scrapbook of stuff that is relevant to my interests.

Flickr news – fresh up are holiday pics from Llangollen canal and the Isle of Purbeck, plus shots from Mostly Jazz Festival weekender who kindly gave me a photo pass.

Grant Thornton Thinking blogs – I help write and edit four blog channels for Grant Thornton UK on/about: business leaders and entrepreneurs, the high net worth community, international markets and boardroom issues. Recently I’ve researched online business networks in China, live-curated the UK Budget and set up a Scoop.It for female finance directors. I’m lucky in that the firm’s online channels are open to exploring new ideas for business and financial content.

The Firehead blog – I’m also blog manager for this European content and comms recruitment company. They let me post LOLcats among the more serious business content. This makes me happy.

My digital switchover

Fiona Cullinan — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 23:53:50 +0000

I wasn’t going to post this but the above is what happens when a pun comment and some beery late night Photoshopping collide. All those TV reminders about the analogue-to-digital switchover in September must have also seeped into my brainz.

How many of the following can you spot in the picture: Robots (5), switches (3), iPhone, TV switchover logo, 8bit nerd, Twitter, multicoloured pixels, newspaper hat, newspaper, cat, magazine and me (twice)?

For the record I used to be a print journalist, now doing purely digital work. Hence the personal mashup of what is in my head now.

The reason I did post this in the end is because I realised afterwards that this IS, in fact, how I tend to learn my digital skills. I muck around with whatever software until I learn how to use it.

In this case, it was Photoshop, which I usually only use for prepping images for the web. Here I got to really delve around with cropping, polygonal lasso, transform, cut and paste, sharpen, rotate and a whole world of effects and settings under the filter menu. It was fun (if never-ending).

So welcome to another 1am production, featuring Creative Commons images from:

Anyone else out there do what I do?

Fiona Cullinan — Mon, 30 May 2011 23:54:58 +0000

The shift in publishing from print to digital has changed my production journalist job beyond all recognition – a transition I blogged about in last year in RIP Sub-editing. Now, instead of ‘journalist’, I answer blogger or web editor or content strategist or content creator or multimedia producer or social reporter or online quality controller – depending on the circumstances I find myself in, the people I am speaking to and what people are more likely to understand.

A memory: covering an FT conference for a client, I got chatting with a senior manager at BT Group who asked what I did. I replied that I was there to interview attendees and get their views for a video blog post – a video blogger. I’ll always remember his reaction: “Is that even a job?”

I’m happy to say that it is. I wasn’t insulted by his comment. I fully understand how fast reporting has changed and how big business has (in general) not kept up. In fact, his reaction wasn’t at all unusual and often people don’t understand the business model behind what I do. But the truth is, my work as a sub-editor and journalist for newspapers and magazines has now morphed into one of facilitator. I assuage the needs of clients, all of whom have become publishers, but most of whom do not have any training in basic publishing skills, production sensibilities or editorial judgment.

They need help. Simply put, I help them.

Another memory: a couple of years ago I was hired out as a freelance corporate blogger by my London agency. My boss said afterwards that my use to the client would be less as a blogger and more as a source of information.

I think that has come true: I am their contact ‘on the inside’ of the world of blogging and online communications. When people talk back to them on the blog, or when in-house experts write their first blog posts, I am a source of context, perspective, advice and training.

What has become interesting about this transition into some kind of digital facilitor is that the ‘hands’ person (blogger, web editor, etc) is also the ‘brains’ person (consultant, content strategist). Don’t get me started on rates for the job. I can see why people pitch themselves as just one thing or the other, even if the company ideally needs a combination of both. But it is because I am a ‘hands’ person that I can be a ‘brains’ person. I believe that to advise, you need to have the practical experience not just the theory.

‘Ask Fiona!’

Being the person who understands the online environment (as much as one ever can) means getting involved in client web content strategy – and beyond, for content strategy doesn’t stand alone but affects (or tries to integrate with) all corporate comms, marketing and media. This tension between the human blogging voice and the corporate print voice is a particularly interesting chasm for companies to cross.

But it makes sense to me to have someone in-house or on-call who can answer such questions and corporate dilemmas. After all, the businesses I work for are in their own business, not publishing or online content marketing. And, to be brutal, few businesses are very good at talking with their clients and users directly.

So sometimes I feel like a content coach. It’s a funny role because sometimes it involves stating the bleeding obvious and watching people be amazed by that.

So what do I actually do?

In truth, it’s a flexible role, meeting each client where they are at in terms of resource, skills and aims. In the past two years, for example, I’ve left my comfort zone of blogger and web editor to work on video production and editing, conference blogging and creating a dedicated content strategy for a large corporate client.

What is becoming more clear as time goes on is that being an ‘information point’ or ‘mentor’ or ‘on-call advisor’ is an important part of helping companies develop their confidence, online skills and strategy while maintaining some level of professionalism as they experiment and find their way.

Change management and the culture shift caused by the internet and its possibilities lie at the heart of what is currently going on in my profession. And that is what I feel I now do: encourage the culture shift one individual or department at a time.

Is this embedded freelance role common?

And that is why I have been feeling a growing separation from content strategy as a field as it tries to define itself. Because in my role, I feel less than a management consultant but more than a web editor. On Monday I might be a strategist and trainer, but on Tuesday I might be a blogger or editor.

The other thing I have been thinking is that I don’t scale. I am embedded into the companies of the clients I work for and I feel alone in that I don’t know anyone else who does this. I have more of a direct relationship with my clients than I do with my agency and yet I am an not employed by them. When I visit London, I work in the client’s office not the agency’s, which helps put me at the heart of what they do rather than an external skill that they hire in. But how can this be sold on to others in need of professional publishing help?

I’m not sure where this post is going. It’s the start of being honest and getting something out there about what I do and my ever-changing job title. Am I the only one in this embedded, flexi-role position? What do I call this? I don’t think it is content strategist and I don’t think it is web editor. Am I a publishing aide? How do I market this out to people who only understand terms such as copywriter or editorial content director?

I think I’ll send that one out to the universe and wait to see if there are any fish of the same stripe out there who might reply.

Secret Stirchley, flashers and goodbye tearoom

Fiona Cullinan — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:56:51 +0000

After donating my teenage memory of ‘being flashed’ to the Secret Stirchley crew at the pop-up arts tearoom, this weekend my embarrassing memory became the stuff of a Stirchley promenade street theatre narrative.

Performed by three actors as part of the Inhabit programme of pop-up tearooms, the stories they had collected from Stirchley residents over the past five weeks were woven into a narrative, relived and professionally delivered by actors as we wandered around the local streets. In this environment, it was hard to tell who was part of the show and who was incidental.

We listened in on the story of a grandmother and her grand-daughter, as well as other characters who overlapped with their lives, from the ghost of a father who went to war and came back shellshocked…

to the grunge boyfriend met in the British Oak…

to a street mugger re-enacting a bag-snatching…

– and to a young girl who was once flashed by a man standing in the reeds of the River Rea, followed by the ensuing police visit asking for rather intimate details and distinguishing marks.

While I enjoyed the show, however, I’m not sure Stirchley is quite ready for such artiness – a feeling which was underlined by two events ahead of the opening Friday performance.

1. The neighbouring solicitor had apparently thrown quite a wobbly about a bit of chalk saying ‘Sweet shop’ on the pavement outside his shop (which was, you’ve guessed it, formerly a sweet shop).

He told them he was trying to conduct a ‘proper business’ and was insistent that they remove it, which they did despite this being a public pavement. His uncompromising reaction seemed unwarranted – especially since the passing promenade didn’t even raise the two front-room workers’ heads as we passed by. And yet his over-reaction forms another B30 tale as I had been to see them the day before and now feel quite disinclined to do business there. Stirchley may be strong in community spirit, but at the same time it has always had its bullies, though maybe that is too strong a word – perhaps he was just having a bad day.

2. The second incident happened when a passing young mum with a pushchair had to be reassured that the mugging wasn’t real, just in case she didn’t spot the unconcerned crowd and phoned the police.

But the show must go and after 40 minutes or so it circled back to the tearoom for the final scene, followed by tea and delicious cakes…

Personally, I think the show would have worked better for me as a direct documentary of Stirchley memories, flowing between characters but without the narrative hook. I suppose I wanted to focus on Stirchley and wanted to hear other people’s memories. I don’t think they needed the plot device, or perhaps I was slightly distracted by the fictionalised performance, which made the memories seem less real somehow.

Still, I have very much enjoyed the tearoom over the past few weeks and I think it will be missed in Stirchley, which is a high street of diverse businesses but none of which offer a particularly sociable stop-off or gathering place (unless you like to go to the pub in the daytime or the ‘Society Cafe’ in the Coop, that is).

The tea-room now moves to Hodge Hill. Lucky things. But I hope that it – or someone else with community spirit – moves into our empty shops soon.

If you want to catch a performance of Secret Stirchley, there is one day left to see it – at 1pm and 4pm tomorrow (Sunday 13th March). Performances are free and start at the shop, on the corner of Ivy Road and Pershore Road.