Jul 20 2020
An email landed in my inbox this morning announcing that it was a year since my first Parkrun. It motivated me to write about my past year in running, and to ponder on volunteer communities. I am a late convert to running, though I ran a lot in my teens (I did some cross-country for …
Sep 19 2016
Atmotube puts air pollution monitoring in your hands, and enables users to share readings in real-time and via social media. Earlier this year, I participated in a COMIT community day workshop which asked us to think about ways in which air quality might be monitored for construction workers in tunnels. As a cyclist and someone employed at …
Feb 06 2014
I recently received an email from social slide-sharing service SlideShare with sad news: Slidecast to be discontinued. It says: We launched Slidecast in 2007 to allow users to pair audio with their slides. While we have seen some great Slidecasts created, usage hasn’t been as widespread as we had hoped, and we have decided to …
Aug 01 2013
Two London events demonstrated different approaches to Twitter engagement and a useful testbed for Twitter analytics tool TweetBinder. In the past week, I have attended a couple of London events which generated quite a few tweets. Last Friday, I participated in a seminar hosted by Honest Buildings looking at architects’ use of the internet, and …
Aug 23 2012
Thanks to a blog post from my fellow PR practitioner friend Neville Hobson (aka @jangles), I learned about Belon.gs, a Finnish start-up that is offering free QR (quick response) tag stickers that individuals can stick to their valuables. I have written about QR codes several times before, having put them on my website, blogs and …
Jul 03 2012
I went to the Building Centre in London yesterday to hear a London Festival of Architecture talk by noted sports-ground expert Simon Inglis, who described his ongoing book project Played in London, the latest in the English Heritage Played in Britain series. As I’m a London dweller who likes sport, history and architecture, it was …
Oct 11 2010
When working as an in-house PR professional, I regularly used to commute to work in central London on my bike. Now I work for myself, this pleasure is denied me, but I often have to travel into town to visit clients’ offices for meetings or meet up with contacts at convenient locations like the Building …
Sep 27 2010
The inaugural communicators bike ride or Comms Club Run (see previous post) took place on Friday on the wettest day (so far) in September 2010. With other riders put off by the gloomy weather forecast, Liam Fitzpatrick and I stuck to Plan A, met up at Watford Junction station at 10am, pointed our road bikes …
Sep 09 2010
Having worked in-house as a PR professional in the construction industry, I noticed the frequency with which golf-playing executives disappeared from the office and (to paraphrase Mark Twain) ‘spoil a good walk’ with some business associates. Being blessed with little hand-to-eye coordination and a dislike of plaid trousers, I never took to the game, and …
