Want to get into inbound marketing? Start with a massage

Published: January 29, 2010

With Angela, the Marie Curie cancer care masseuseLast night was the first meet-up of the London Inbound Marketing Group, at the Piano and Pitcher in Holborn. Great bunch of people who ventured from Ipswich, Cambridge, Dublin and just round the corner to chat about blogging, social media and the business of getting found online.

I also enjoyed the personal attention of a rather dishy masseuse. Stictly in the interests of inbound marketing, you understand.

One of several interesting conversations I had was with Noel Shannon, CEO of Silicon Cloud – the company doing a great job of bringing Hubspot’s inbound marketing techniques to Europe. He mentioned that he never used the term ‘outbound marketing’ until he heard of ‘inbound marketing’. Same here. But then, a couple of years ago, neither of us knew that the media and marketing world was about to be turned on its head.

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UMapper: The easy mapping tool for all seasons

Published: January 28, 2010

There's much more to UMapper than weatherI re-visited user-friendly mapping tool UMapper this week, after an email from them announcing the official launch of their whizz-bang weather maps.

Creating a UMapper live weather map really is a piece of cake. Just log into UMapper, choose the weather template, zoom in on the area you want to display, save, and copy the resulting code to your blog. Done.

Clickable temperature markers show the five-day forecast and US maps have live radar feed too.

Besides weather mapping, UMapper has a few other gizmos that really impress me (especially from an education perspective), such as the ability to upload custom maps and create ‘geo-games’.

But just before we move on to those, here’s a weather map for the Midlands (remember, the radar slider won’t work in UK). If you’d like to see how to make one in about 30 seconds, watch this short UMapper video.

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The missing link in video editing: Why we need iMovie for PC

Published: January 4, 2010

If you’re interested in journalism education, or video editing, I recommend to you the conversation going on over at Mindy McAdams’ excellent blog.

She’s comparing video editing platforms available for educators and learners. And that’s the point. There just isn’t ONE that does the job. It’s plain bonkers.

As every educator and editor I know has been asking for years: Why on earth isn’t there a decent quality, affordable video editor that works on both PC and Mac?

If that isn’t a gap in the market, I don’t know what is.

What I’d really like to see is iMovie for PC. Apple did it for iTunes, so why not? Yes, I know there’s megabucks in music, and I know Apple wants you to buy a shiny new Mac. But what would it be worth to Apple for the worldwide video community (still growing fast, we’re told) to see the natural progression as iMovie to Final Cut?

In my humble opinion, it wouldn’t be just Apple that reaped the rewards, or amateur movie makers, but journalism.

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Baby Hamad proves that journalism is a labour of love

Published: January 3, 2010

I have to show you this gorgeous picture of baby Hamad, whose mother – a journalist – has attended three of the courses I’ve run in Abu Dhabi.

Well, two and a half courses, actually.

Because Hamad was born a couple of days into a recent multimedia course at the city’s twofour54 training academy.

You didn’t need the eagle eye of a seasoned journalist to spot that mum-to-be Amal Almehairi was about to go into creative overdrive. But the speed at which this particular story broke took everyone by surprise.

Especially Amal.

Always punctual, it was clear something was up when Amal didn’t arrive  on the third morning. Neither did Alsaad Almenhaly, a fellow journalist at the Arabic-language Al Ittihad newspaper, who was also on the course. (On a previous Multimedia Tools course, Alsaad had made a great impression with her video skills using a Flip camera).

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