At the beginning of September, I was invited (via Twitter) to take part in a photowalk for Jap-Fest, a festival of Japanese motorsport and motoring, at Mondello Park. While I am more of a motorbike enthusiast, I have always liked motor-sports cars and racing as well, so I was looking forward to photographing the event.

I shot with a Sony DSC T-700 and a Fuji Finepix S7000, slightly more humble pieces of equipment in comparison to a lot of the other photographers! While the camera doesn’t make the photographer, there is a visible difference in my photos in comparison with some of the others. For one, I felt that it wasn’t worth for me to try to get really good action shots or close-ups because I simply didn’t have the equipment to do this with. Secondly, I tend to prefer to shoot photos as they are, with very little or no photoshopping/ re-touching in post-production (blame my occupation if you like, I like to leave PhotoShop at the office.)

Below is a selection of some of my images, and the entire set can be viewed on Flickr or Pix.ie. It was a challenge shooting in the wet weather but nonetheless an enjoyable day.

* Check out the guys in the left background of this photo – pity the lighting was bad in that area, I think they make the image interesting.

Thanks Mondello for the invite, namely John, Corporate Sales & Marketing Manager for Mondello and a photoblogger himself, and Fergus. Mondello Park have have a number of race events throughout the year, as well as a driving school. Thanks to Stephen Holmes and Treasa Lynch for the lifts out to Kildare and back! Also, thanks to the other photographers (links to their own websites/ twitter accounts are listed below) – it was nice to meet you all in person:

Jennifer Farley (Jennifer, I hi-jacked your list of photographers below – hope that is ok!)

Elliott Tucker

Stephen Holmes

John Williams

Treasa Lynch

Ryan Whalley

Claire Wilson

Kyle Tunney

Kate Southall

Julie

Rory Wallace

Davy Mac

Redmum

Derek McAuley

Gillian McEnteggart

Emmet

Al Higgins

Mike Patterson

Shane Murphy

- Niamh.

I learned a lot in 2008… and I loved a lot as well. Read about some of the highlights of my year from music, books, design, the web and technology to Obama, going green, success and failure, who I am/ what I do and sticktuitiveness!

Music:
I continue to and always will love music. I discovered some new music and re-discovered some old favourites in the form of Santogold, MGMT, Katy Perry, the Ting Tings, Lykke Li, Vampire Weekend, Sam Sparro, Duffy, Kanye West, SIA, The Script, Kings of Leon, Jeff Buckley, Jewel, Billy Holiday and more…

Books:
I re-discovered my love of books. Having always felt that I didn’t have enough time (or rather didn’t make enough time) to read more due to studying and a heavy workload, I finally made some progress to read more in 2008. Favourite reads included: “Let The Right One In” by John Ajvide Lindqvist and “What Should I Do With My Life?” by Po Bronson. Read an inspirational excerpt from Bronson’s book.

What/ Who I am… What/ Who am I?
I’m a designer. No, I’m a multimedia producer. No, I’m a developer. No, I’m a project manager. No, I’m a marketeer. No, I’m a web consultant… It can be hard to define what I do because up to now I’ve done a lot of things. In parallel with that, I’m creative, I’m a photographer, a musician, a film-maker, a writer and a human. What I do and who am I are still sometimes quite different and I want them to be more aligned and streamlined… For now let’s go with the working title of creator and communicator. I’m working on it!

Impressing the wrong people:
If you want to impress people, impress the right people – those whom you respect and want to emulate.

Success and failure:
Failure doesn’t feel good but you can learn and grow from it. (Continued) success at the wrong thing can trap you forever. I like freedom.

Going green:
I did more than turn off the computers and lights in 2008. I moved paying my bills online, recycled more, donated more, eat organic and started replacing the regular lightbulbs in my house. Read 50 ways to help the planet.

Breaking up:
There is no such thing as a good break-up. However, you can ease the pain a little by being clear, honest and respectful with yourself and to the person that you are/ were involved with. If all that comes out of a break-up is another lesson in life that’s something more than you started with.
“You have to forgive to forget, and forget, to feel again.”
– unknown

“Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable.”
– Wizard of Oz

Design:
In 2008, I was inspired by websites including The Grid System and Fontstruct and a huge amount of musicians, writers, bloggers, designers, film-makers, artists, logos, t-shirt designs, album covers, furniture, architecture, street art, art art, websites, nature and photography.

The web & social networking:
In 2008, I loved Twitter… Yes, twitter gets all of my web/ social networking love for the year! I also really liked LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and SlideShare.

Technology:
In 2008, I loved my Apple I-Mac, my Sony Cybershot T-700 and my magic 8-ball (I consider my 8-ball technology and it gives me answers to some very important questions!).

Obama:
Change is good! I loved watching history being made in 2008.

Style:
In 2008, I loved my retro Nike 6.0 Air Morgan’s, my Converse, my skinny jeans, my PLO scarves, my Abercrombie hoodies, my trilby hats, my big chunky watches and my tribal earrings.

Wall-E:
One of the most unique and unexpected movies of 2008.

Advice:
Always listen to advice but don’t necessarily take it… look to your gut. I listened to a lot of advice this year but I’m glad that I didn’t take some of it. Working in a stockbrokers was an experience but I’m glad that I didn’t buy shares!

Travel:
An eternal traveler. In 2008, I got to see Barcelona again and visited Sicily and Lisbon for the first time.

Having fun:
Whether it was playing a wii for the first time, having a game of tennis, chilling out watching a good movie, going for a rollerblade, going to a gig, walking the dogs or just laughing out loud. I loved it all! But I want to have more fun in 2009!

And finally, a new word:
“Sticktuitiveness”. I went to a talk that Erin Brockovich was presenting at and she introduced me to this word. A determination to persevere and to stick with an endeavor once you’ve committed to it while using your intuition. I love it.

Happy New Year all!

- Niamh.

Good luck to those that have been nominated! If anyone fancy’s a sneak peak before the nominations have been disclosed, apparently there’s leaks popping up already.

Last week, both the Irish Times and the Guardian Newspapers had articles about this topic. Facebook, with 59 million active users, has a current growth rate of over 2 million new users a week. There are daily news items about the website; last week alone saw journalists discussing issues such as debating the privacy security of the website (related to this post but nonetheless deserves it’s own post if not an entire article at a later date!) and the websites possibility of copyright infringement of Hasbro and Mattel’s Scrabble game (Facebook’s online version “Scrabulous”). However, I would like to focus on one issue in this post – will Facebook prevent you getting hired for a job or cause you not to get a place in college?

Simply put, no. You yourself, however, can utilise any social networking website, or any communication medium for that matter, to publish information about yourself, your attitudes, lifestyle or opinions that may not give a prospective employer or admissions tutor that great an impression of you as a working professional or as a prospective student. It is afterall not illegal to google someone, regardless of whether you are an employer or not. I don’t see why people can’t either set their Facebook profiles to private and take care in adding ‘friends’ to their profile (call me niave but I used to think that it was quality over quantity that mattered most in friendships) or else why can’t they set up two profiles; a personal profile for their friends (which is set to private) and a professional profile for their work colleagues, career networks and so forth? Yes, of course there will be times in your professional life when you may encounter situations where social and business obligations overlap and the same can be true of social networking. For example, most people surely will build up friendships with the people that they were in college with and similarly with work colleagues but the old adage has to be true in any working environment; don’t mix business with pleasure. It is possible to keep your professional and private lives intact all while having some fun with social networking websites such as FaceBook, MySpace, and Bebo. I don’t think it is that hard to be able to be yourself while letting common sense guide you.

Losing face:

— Photographs of Amy Polumbo, Miss New Jersey, posing with pumpkins held to her chest led to an alleged blackmail, and the national Miss America organisation reviewing whether she was fit to hold her crown. The pictures, from her Facebook profile, were splashed across American newspapers

— A survey of 600 British companies revealed that one in five had logged on to Facebook and other networking websites to vet potential employees. Jacqueline Thomson, from public relations firm Brands2Life, said that she had turned down one applicant after learning that he had used Facebook “to criticise previous employers and discuss company information”

— In Toronto, Canada, five students were banned from a school trip after disparaging remarks about teachers were found on Facebook

— Brad Karsh, a US career consultant, turned down a job applicant after reading on Facebook that his interests were “smokin’ blunts with the homies” and “shooting caps into whitie”

— A university in Pennsylvania denied a 27-year-old woman a teaching degree on the grounds that she was promoting under-age drinking, after she posted a photo of herself on Facebook, titled “Drunken Pirate”

— Several students at DePauw University, Indiana, were disciplined after college authorities used Facebook to trace those responsible for vandalising a sculpture of a deer

Source: Times database.

Related Links:

• “Caught on camera – and found on Facebook” by Patrick Foster, The Times
• “Would-be students checked on Facebook” by Jessica Shepherd and David Shariatmadari, The Guardian
• “To Blog or Not to Blog?” by Alison Doyle, About.com
• “How to Blog Safely.“ by Electronic Frontier Foundation
• “Facebook, MySpace et al. ” by Evil HR Lady
• “Facebook and employment: an equal opportunity information trap” by Denise Howell, ZDnet
• “How to use Facebook without Losing Your Job over it” on internet-duct-tape
• “How to Avoid Getting Fired by Facebook” by lifehack.org
• “Hire profile” by Hazel Davis, The Guardian

I have no idea how I first heard/ read about/ came across Twitter but I am on it!

If you’re on it to and would like to follow me, I’m here:
http://twitter.com/nredmond

“Blogs Will Change Your Business.” Or so the May 2nd, 2005 issue of Business Week stated, but which blogging software should you use?

Undoubtedly, web publishing in the form of blogging has gained popularity as a legitimate business, communications and marketing tool. Furthermore, any internet web manager, developer, designer or digital media industry professional who is worth their weight should maintain a blog, apparently. I myself finally got around to setting up my new blog using WordPress. So… why a new blog? And why have I chosen the blogging software that I have?

Well, having been online since 2000, the blog that I used to maintain was updated sporadically at best, the capabilities of the blog were cumbersome and customisation was extremely limited. Two degrees later, a number of years industry experience and not to mention the changing nature of the digital media landscape itself had me wanting to create a fresh, new, clean-slate kind of blog. Furthermore, despite the fact that my current hosting company, Go Daddy, offers their own QuickBlog system, I decided that I wanted more options than what was on offer. There are a number of other hosted blogging services available, such as TypePad, Blogger and LiveJournal. However, I decided that the benefits of a self-hosted blogging package would outweigh the drawbacks of maintaining my own blog installation. After some research (and assessing what blogging software fellow industry people/ those that I admire were using) I narrowed my choices down to 3: Movable Type, WordPress and TextPattern.

On first impressions, I preferred the Movable Type website. However, as Dustin Diaz notes in his own blog, “One should never choose one software over the other based soley on the look of it. I basically got the impression that the classier the UI, the better the functionality must be. Surely a first class design means first class development tools. Wrong”.

So, I dug a little deeper and did my homework. Some help with this included reading an excellent article on the Site Point website, “Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed“, which “assesses the performance of the most popular self-hosted options as they go head to head in the battle to become *your* chosen blog software.”

So, who won the battle to become *my* chosen blog software?
- WordPress.

The reasons for this were that WordPress was the best fit for managing static content through the same interface as dynamic content. WordPress also seemed to have the most flexibility in its configuration options, an extensive support community with additional plugins available, permalink flexibility, easy categorisation of content and was very easy to setup (more on this below). There’s no doubt that the different types of blogging software have their own strengths and weaknesses, WordPress just turned out to be the right fit for me.

So, I put the famous ‘5-minute install‘ for the blogging software to the test. On first attempt (3 weeks ago) I gave up after 15 minutes! What can I say?!? It was certainly no reflection on the WordPress software or installation instructions but more to do with my frame of mind at the time – One hundred and one things to do in work, having database connection problems with my host, trying to organise a holiday and subsequently, being in very bad need of that holiday! So… cut to three weeks later – back from the holiday (Sweden & Denmark… hopefully I’ll have more to write about these locations in a future post) and back to the WordPress install. The ‘5-minute install’ took 3 minutes! Happy days.

So, which is the ‘right’ blogging software to use? Well, there is no one ‘right’ package. Some blogging software will suit certain situations better than others. The most suitable choice for me was WordPress, the most suitable choice for you might be something else. Regardless, whatever blogging software you choose should be the one that optimises the productivity of your web publishing. Content really is king afterall!

Related Links:

• The famous ‘5 minute installation’ for WordPress
• Example WordPress installation
• Visual tutorial on how to install Wordpress
• Installing WordPress-An Audio-Visual Presentation
• Business Week May 2nd, 2005 Cover Article – “Blogs Will Change Your Business“.
• ./with Imagination Blog Article – “Movable Type versus Wordpress” by Dustin Diaz.
• Direct Marketing News – “Four reasons why your business should blog next year” by Kevin Hillstrom.
• Site Point Article “Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed” by Vinnie Garcia.
• USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review – Blog software comparison chart
• USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review – “Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?“by Susannah Gardner.
• Wikipaedia – Weblogs
• Movable Type: http://www.movabletype.org
• WordPress: http://www.wordpress.org
• Blogger: http://www.blogger.com
• Textpattern: http://www.textpattern.com