Highlights were meeting the man behind sneezecount, Pete Fletcher, who has been counting his sneezes since July 2007, and having a good chat to Nick Booth and Paul Bradshaw about potential fringe events for the Digital Film and Media Event that will take place in Birmingham in October. This is a conversation I hope to take further and widen out to Birmingham’s digital community as the official programme starts to shape up over the coming weeks. A process which will undoubtedly combine both online and offline idea generation.

A bit slow getting this up, but I enjoyed a great weekend in Paris a fortnight ago for Tom’s 30th Birthday. Although the flight from Birmingham was easy and very quick, I’m definitely going to try the Eurostar next time. Negotiating the Paris Metro from airport to hotel at 11pm with a suitcase is not a brilliant experience!

The highlight had to be gawping at the huge Impressionist collection in the fantastic surroundings of the Musee D’Orsay. There is something quite indescribable about the experience of seeing paintings that have been reproduced a million times over, on everything from jigsaw puzzles to mouse mats, so closely that you can make out every brush stroke. When things become so common-place, they can start to lose some of their beauty, but seeing them in their original form brought all of that back to me.

We also spent an interesting couple of hours in the colossus that is the Louvre, and couldn’t resist watching the crowds that had come to watch the Mona Lisa. 

So where do I start… I took the decision to leave Neon Communications last year, after three years as a director. It was a tough one, as the company was enjoying a good profile with some great clients, and I was working with a fantastic team. But it’s fair to say that I had reached a bit of a crossroads, and after much careful consideration I decided that - if I was going to make it on my own - it was now or never time.

Tied in with this was a very real desire to see more of the world. I started my first PR job as an account executive at Willoughby PR, before I’d even really left student life. I was excited at the prospect of joining a really well respected Birmingham agency with some fantastic clients, so while many of my friends were off enjoying long summer holidays or travelling the globe, I got stuck in learning the ropes of the PR trade.

I don’t regret that decision one bit. I learnt a huge amount from some very inspirational people and having the opportunity to head up Willoughby’s sister company, Neon, some years later was an exciting opportunity for me and one that I relished. But in hindsight, I don’t think it was a huge suprise when, seven years later, I got the itch to broaden my horizons.

So last September I was lucky enough to enjoy three months on the other side of the world. It soon became clear to me that this distance and space to think was exactly what I needed to recharge my batteries and get some of that creative drive back again.

Now I’m back in Birmingham and very excited about the future. I’ve been working as a consultant since January on some great projects, and I have a very real optimism for the years ahead, both for my own personal venture and the creative sector in the city and region generally.

The next few months are going to be particularly interesting. I’ve just taken on my first part-time employee, am in the process of registering my ‘official’ company and am hoping to move into new office space in the next few weeks.

I’ll be posting snippets here and there which will hopefully be of interest to anyone else thinking about or actively doing the same. And just to prove that life shouldn’t just be about work (!), there’ll be a few other distractions from time to time.

In the meantime, something interesting happened today, which in a funny way sums up some of my feelings about the evolution of communication.

I wondered up to Harborne high street this morning with my other half, Tom, for a mooch around the shops and to get some fresh air. I had a cheque to pay in courtesy of my mobile phone provider, £45 cashback to try and sweeten the huge mobile bills I’m paying each month. I couldn’t live without my crackberry at the moment, having instant access to emails and clients is so important when you’re working by yourself. I look at it as my virtual office. But as we all know, the faster communications move, the more instantly accessible you become, any place any where, and for good or bad, standard 9 – 5 working hours go right out of the window.

As I was tapping my details into the computerised paying in facility, Tom asked me what I was planning to spend the £45 on. Although I’ve spent that several times over for my mobile recently, it still seemed like a bit of a treat. With friends coming over for dinner tonight, I expected that to go on the Tesco bill, but as we wondered along the high street an old Imperial typewriter in the window of a charity shop caught my eye.

I’m a bit of a history freak; I spent three years at Birmingham Uni getting excited about social history and the way that any change effects the lives of ordinary people. I’ve also recently spent three months travelling, with no posessions other than a bag of clothes and a few books to trade at the next town.

Along with thinking about the value of culture and craft in the future, after reading Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle on my travels, this had all got me realising that I don’t own anything of any real value – whether it be monetary or sentimental. As new technologies come in, our possessions become more and more disposable – whether that be mass produced furniture, clothing or the latest mobile phone. What precious items will we have to hand down to our children? At this rate, a bag of useless cables and leads and a few odd looking items that won’t work because batteries don’t exist anymore.

By some odd coincidence, the typewriter in the window was £45 and as any shopoholic knows, when you get a sign like that – you just have to have it. Maybe I’d been influenced by watching Briony Tallis in Atonement last night, and that this could be all the inspiration I needed to write my first novel, but it seemed to me that owning a little piece of communications history had some real value.

Of course, part of the beauty of new technology is the speed with which you can get answers, and a quick search revealed that my Imperial 50 Model would have been made some time between 1927 and 1955. Having a bit of a fanciful imagination, I love to think about who would have used this machine during that fascinating period of English history, and why. The quality is fantastic, it was built to last; this machine could be 80 years old, and it still works.

Apologies for the quality of the photo, I couldn’t find the charger for my digital camera so I had to take it on my phone…

The list of ten (and a few more) came out of the discussion, and is posted at Longstation, but the really interesting angle for me was a debate regarding the status of bloggers, and how they should be approached by those of us in the PR world. Specifically, there was some discussion around whether bloggers should be treated as journalists, and whether or not they wanted to be.

It was clear, and not surprising to hear, that bloggers get annoyed when they receive a constant barrage of untargeted PR material. There was some concern about bloggers finding themselves on a number of media databases used by the PR industry, and being increasingly bombarded with generic press releases that are of no interest to them. That’s how we all feel when our inbox gets full of spam.

As any hard-working PR exec will know, this lazy approach will not win any favours with journalists either, but then as a profession we’ve historically had a lot longer to understand how individual media work and the time to build fruitful contacts. The sudden growth of blogging, and a desire to interact with this powerful communication channel, combined with a lack of understanding about how bloggers work is obviously creating real issues for both sides.

The other side of the argument here is when bloggers want to be treated like journalists, but are often not given the same status. An example was given of bloggers being invited to events, but then not receiving press passes and the traditional perks that go with them.

It was all beginning to sound very ‘them and us’. Surely the beauty of blogging is that anyone can set themselves up to get their thoughts and opinions out there. Naturally, the more gifted will build a stonger reputation, a larger following and therefore greater value in the eyes of those of us looking to convince them to give us the odd plug here and there. But as more of us start blogging, the line between ‘them and us’ is going to blur.

The best piece of advice I’ve been given on this subject is from Pete Ashton, who reminds those of us in the business of promotion that the best way to spread the word is to start blogging ourselves. If the content we produce is of real interest and value, it will get picked up. By blogging, we’ll also understand a whole lot more about the process and hopefully how to stop pissing people off!

Seeing as I’m here in Texas as part of a West Midlands contingent, it was funny to stumble across this pub on my first trip into Austin. Is Shakespeare our region’s most exportable brand? Answers on a postcard/blogpost. I’m going to start a list. 

An artist’s impression of the Opening Remarks session at SXSWi 

As a self-confessed newbie to interactive, this comment by Henry Jenkins at today’s Opening Remarks session at SXSW no doubt had a greater impact on me than the 100s of other live-bloggers sitting around me at the Austin Convention Centre. I came to this event expecting to feel three steps behind most other delegates and prepared to google every other word in each keynote session.

But today couldn’t have been more different. It’s really opened my eyes to the fact that everyone involved in digital is on a learning curve. I doubt that my posts from SXSW will be ground-breaking to those who are already immersed in the digital world. But hopefully they will be an interesting read for those of you, like me, who are just starting to feel their way.

I started this morning at a session on ‘What teens want online & on their phones’. My first thought was, I doubt teens are going to confess what they really want in front of a room full of adults. But with the enviable confidence that seems ingrained in so many Americans, a panel of 7 young people spoke about their relationship with the web and answered questions, primarily from an army of marketeers (no surprises there.)

The session wasn’t hugely enlightening , but it did underline a few interesting points. It seems that even young people are experiencing social networking fatigue, and although sites like Facebook and MySpace are still seen as a necessity- as one panellist said ‘It’s not my life’.

The panel were asked how they engage with factual content on the web, good causes and news. It was a real eye-opener to learn that they all got their news and factual information through YouTube and Wikipedia, and not one of the panel had visited a traditional news site, such as CNN. One even mentioned that she learns about what goes on in the world through The Onion, a satirical news site. That raises a lot of questions about the news that is being consumed by young people and the value of current news sources for future generations.

One panellist, a young teenager, had her MySpace page invaded by a hacker and was sent a number of, in her words, inappropriate videos. I found it surprising that this wasn’t picked up during the panel discussion, or addressed by any of the audience in their questions. They were mostly too concerned with finding out how they could encourage young people to buy Pop Tarts and watch the Disney Channel.  

Despite working in marketing myself, I left feeling a little depressed, so was glad to get an injection of positivity during the Opening Remarks session with Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, and the author Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good For You).  It really blew away some of my prejudices and brought home the benefits of collective intelligence, particularly for young people. The web is there to inspire and help young people to create, not just to consume. I won’t bother to repeat the session here as it will all be available on the SXSW site, but its well worth a listen. I’m looking forward to finding out more.

It’s a long way from Brum.

It’s very flat.

There is a beautiful sunset.

People are really friendly and excited that we have come over for SXSW, from the guys on the plane, to the taxi driver, to the hotel receptionist. There’s a real buzz about it. Even the hotels have ‘welcome SXSW’ signs outside. Can’t wait to see what it’s all about tomorrow!

However, this time around I shouldn’t be too far from my office, albeit a virtual one, despite being nearly 5,000 miles away. I’m lucky enough to be heading to Texas tomorrow for SXSW Interactive, thanks to support from Digital Central. A group of us are heading over to live and breath interactive media for the next five days, make some valuable contacts and share our experiences with the digital media community back in the West Midlands. My reason for going is to learn more about this fantastic festival , make some valuable contacts and spread the word about the Digital Media and Film Event taking place in Birmingham this October, which I’m project managing. I can’t wait. All I need to do now is attempt to clear the to-do list,  pack by bags and find my passport!

I’ll be posting my thoughts and SXSW experiences on this blog, and you can  find out more about what we’re all up to at www.sxswm.com. More news on the Digital Media and Film Event to come very soon.