or What do we mean by improvement. Improvement generally means a measurable positive change in something over time. read more...

Last Friday and Saturday I visited the fair city of Sheffield for a marvellous nerdy conference: unsheffield or #uns1 to its friends, subtitled “Future users of cool technology”. For those who aren’t familiar with the format, according to wikipedia an unconference is “a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. read more...

Ancoats is imminently launching a new public space dubbed The Cutting Room the launch event for which is a user-generated series of activities as submitted to The Cutting Room Experiment website. Much has been written about the experiment by various local bloggers; @manchesterisace @mancubist and @runpaintrunrun have all weighed in in with varying degrees of analysis and opinion. read more...

Check out the rest of my photographs on Flickr Last week I made the pilgrimage, on my bike, in the rain to the Futuresonic conference and festival. Not a huge pilgrimage to be honest as it takes place in Manchester down at the Contact Theatre, but an important event nonetheless which collides the worlds of technology, music and art. read more...

A few weeks back I met the rather excellent Mario Cacciottolo at the Manchester Social Media Cafe. He runs this rather neat photography project called Someone Once Told Me for which he gets people to write something that (you guessed it) someone once told them on a big flip chart and then be photographed. read more...

Module 1: Analysing the Professional Context This is a piece of assessed coursework for my Masters Degree in case you were wondering why there is a 4000 word blog post suddenly appeared. Please bear with my while I fix all the formatting and cross a few 'i's and dot a few 't's. read more...

You know what I'm like, brain always ticking over and getting sidetracked onto tangents. A couple of times in the last week or so I've seen people moan about something on twitter and thought "You know what, I could make something out of that" First off was an idea for some kind of twitter enabled nutrition and weight-loss service inspired by Jon The Beef - something along the lines of "you tell it what you had for lunch and it works out your calorie intake". read more...

On Wednesday night at Manchester's burgeoning Social Media Cafe or #smc_mcr for short I ran a slightly impromptu session on Mashups. The idea was initially that after getting over the initial hurdle of making sure everyone knew what a mashup actually is or could be we would share some ideas and our favourite ones that we had come across. read more...

I've been delighting in the camera built in to my new macbook and so this post contains no less than SIX videos - for the optimum experience watch them in sequence as you read the post. Just knowing that I can make little videos without having to mess about with cameras is quite empowering and making me re-think how I present things online. read more...

My friend and mentor Alan Scott died on Thursday 16th October 2008. This came on compounded sadness as his long time partner Gail Braybon had also departed this earthly life after a long battle with cancer back in August. read more...

I got my ballot papers and I voted. Woot. read more...

There is something in the air in Manchester at the moment. the referendum on the Transport Investment Fund (and Congestion Charge) scheme is a source of great debate all around the town, on the trains, in the coffee places, in the papers wherever. read more...

I have thought of Samscam as the window through which I manage my online identity right from the early days. From a few static webpages to the online CV that got me my job in Sheffield through various generations of this crufty home-grown blogging tool and photo gallery stuff. read more...

A few days ago I got my first electricity bill for the flat, something that has only taken e-on the best part of 6 months to sort out. It was under-estimated and still in the landlord's name so I figured it might be wise to get the matter cleared up before I get saddled with a court summons or something. read more...

The other week Scott at work asked me how I manage to find out about interesting gigs to go to - and the answer is that it's mostly through hanging out and getting to know people and getting invited to stuff - however for the slightly more organised gigs I also find trawling the listings on last. fm pretty handy. read more...