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.

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?

Just back from a week in the centre of France in a little known area called the Cantal. It may be “one of the most sparsely populated and geographically isolated French departments”, according to Wikipedia, but it does have one big claim in that the region encompasses Europe’s largest volcano. Snowshoeing a sleeping volcano seemed an irresistible storyline.

Cantal is 70km across and not a classical cone-shaped volcano but one which has been carved through millions of years of glacial activity which have shifted its lava stone into a series of mountains, valleys and plateaux.

Of course, Cantal also boasts much in the way of traditional ‘Frenchness’: an astonishing array of high-spec cheese, gourmet cuisine, glorious wines, chic boutique auberges and historic vintage. But I was there to cover my pitch: ‘Snowshoeing in the French volcanoes’. (France has volcanoes? Yes, albeit extinct ones.)

While I’m writing the feature for the Sunday Mercury in the Midlands, thanks to free wifi in all our accomms, I did get to do a considerable amount of blogging – which I’m using as trip notes and practice for creating multimedia content to tell the story of a press trip.

Foreign journalists are so rare (in winter) that we even found ourselves the subject of a feature for the local daily, La Montagne.

Anyways, as well as the video above, here is the series of text, photo and video-blogging posts I produced (including the rail trip there and back):

1. The journey’s the thing – video post covering the 11-hour rail journey from Brum to Clermont-Ferrand.
2. Bicephalous Clermont-Ferrand photowalk – a solo travel stopover and photowalk around ‘the Liverpool of France’, Clermont-Fd.
3. Journey into the Cantal, Auvergne mountains - short video showing the landscape on the way to Cantal. On the return journey from Vic-Sur-Cere, I discovered that the track rises up into the mountains after Murat – a far more scenic option if you’re booking a route.
4. Trip notes: Auberge d’Aijean, Cantal – notes on the accommodation while waiting for the press trip proper to start.
5. Snowshoeing Cantal: Europe’s biggest volcano - a video post featuring things I learnt about showshoeing and what happens when there has been no snow.
6. Le Lorian ski resort and Chez Lucy’s choc pud – I can’t ski but there was plenty to film on the pistes at the highest summit in the Cantal, including a mountain rescue.
7. A mountain refuge in the Cantal – no snowshoes but we still hiked half way up a mountain to reach Bernard’s hut. Video/photo post.
8. BBQ duck in a hut – I didn’t like duck until this method of cooking changed my mind. Photos, video and trip notes on a Finnish-style grill hut and campsite.
9. Fell in love with a dog at La Roussiere – photogenic animals in the Siniq Valley.
10. Around the Cantal in 10 dishes – French press trips serve up some awesome food. Overindulged – and suffered for it.
11. Gare de Lyon’s tropical garden – in surprise tourist news, there is an underground tropical rainforest garden alongside Metro line 14 platform (direction Olympiades).

There may be more posts to come, but I’d better get on and write the feature first.

Meanwhile here is my plea to do more of this kind of recording of stories for tourist boards, tour operators and other travel brands and conferences.

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.

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!

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.

Travmedia, a press release and journalist alert service which connects journalists and PRs, has just made a very smart move (I hope) by launching a Facebook-style social network, that will facilitate many more travel trade connections and work opportunities, and make travel freelancers like myself more visible to travel editors.

‘My Network’ is a little clunky to use at first – a beta feedback option would be good for members so that they can improve the user experience. And there are currently some privacy issues – if you are a Travmedia member you should immediately update your default profile so that your full address doesn’t show, for example.

But I think this might be the first useful work-oriented network I’ve joined since Twitter, which has become a little noisy of late.

The success of ‘My Network’ may be dependent on whether others adopt its usage and how Travmedia develops the service. But it’s already been helpful to me in finding PRs for areas I want to cover, for reconnecting with friends I’ve met on press trips and for posting feature pitches and commissions.

We shall see how our relationship progresses after the first flush is over.

Having wrestled with a significant number of roadblocks for what is a fairly straightforward dataset, I am happy to announce the birth of my first data visualisation comparing 2011 figures for the percentage of women in the boardroom across a number of different countries. (Data source: Grant Thornton International Business Report). This is just a tester graphic, though. I now have to figure out how to show this over time, and with many more countries, and on a world map. *Gulp.*

Update: I have added in the rest of the 2011 data by country so that it can be represented on a world map. Can’t seem to customise the horrible brown colour though.

Now to try adding in extra maps to show the data in different years…

[Tum-te-tum.]

Less than 15 minutes later, the rest of the data is input and a graphic created which shows the state of play for senior women in business since 2004. You’ll have to click through to see this in action. Either click ‘All’ maps in the toolbar above the map, or select by year from the dropdown menu bottom left.

Phew. Logging off now and going to pub.

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.

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.