Are You Watching The Race?

The US party nominations race is fascinating. It’s been years since we’ve been captivated by the presidential nominations on this side of the pond. Usually we wait until US voters have decided who’s actually running for the job of president before throwing a gaze across from time to time, ruminating on which nominee is going to be best for us (the rest of the world), but this time, the USA has two brilliant competitive races that are captivating our attention. [Read more]

Are They Playing With Our Money

In the financial news the Chancellor, Alastair Darling, has announced a proposal aimed at preventing a “Northern Rock” style run on banks in the future.

The proposal seeks, amongst other things, to allow the Bank of England to rescue troubled banks in secret, providing emergency loan assistance for a specific period before requiring the rescue package to be made public.

Under the proposal announced today, this period of “non-disclosure” would be allowed to prevent an “adverse impact ” on consumer confidence.

‘Run’ Leaves Bank Vulnerable

Consumer bank Northern Rock saw panic at it’s doors a few months ago, when its business practices left it short of a few bob and it became a casualty of the “credit crunch”, caused by the US sub-prime mortgages issue.

It has recently sold it’s equity release portfolio in an attempt to stablise and get back the business banking as usual. The situation is said to be the first ‘run’ on a British Bank in 100 years.

Will Proposals Help

Here in the UK, our banks, the Bank of England and the Treasury have all sought to reassure the British public that the sub-prime mortgage problem will not affect our markets as badly as it has in the United States.

However I am not sure that all the announcements being made, the current stock market conditions, and the slowdown in the UK property market, coupled with the proposals announced today in the news will have the desired effect.

Our mistrust of government and the perception that it lacks transparency may only serve to reinforce the fear that the worst is yet to come and dent consumer bank confidence even more.

The proposal put together by HM Treasury, FSA and The Bank of England, will now enter a 12 week consultation period.

In the meantime, we’ll have to wait and see whether these proposals are a help or a hindrance to consumers and banks in need of assistance.

Hackers Bring Down Popular BloggingZoom

I was in the process of writing a post about BloggingZoom, the ‘Digg’ for bloggers when I got wind from Internet Marketing champion Courtney Tuttle that the site has been hacked. Courtney is one of the founder/owners of BloggingZoom alongside Vic of BloggerUnleashed who’s site coincidentally is also down.

BloggingZoom is a fast growing site for bloggers who want to promote and publicize their sites. The team there positively encourage bloggers to submit their own content and the BloggingZoom community support this in a big way.

Let’s hope the site get’s back up soon.

Sir Edmund Hillary Dies

Sir Edmund Hillary has died. Aged 88 Sir Edmund died last night. He was the first man to climb the worlds highest mountain, Mount Everest. Sir Edmund Hillary had been suffering health problems since last April, apparently as the result of a fall in Nepal. New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said that his death was a profound loss and described him as

“…an heroic figure who not only ‘knocked off’ Everest but lived a life of determination, humility and generosity.”

It’s sad to know that this brave man has now gone. Sir Edmund Hillary’s achievements show how the human spirit can endure the harshest conditions and still survive to help others who need help.

Sir Edmund Hillary

19 July 1919 - 10 January 2008

Use images to give your posts extra zing

Since changing the layout of The Ramblings of a Longtime Procrastinator to a more magazine type format on the front page, I have had to source many more images for my blog. I’m a good weather photographer so I haven’t been taking much new photos for a while and the ones that are in the my photo collection aren’t always suitable for use wth the posts I create, so this leaves me having to source images.

There are some obvious places to look for usable images such as Google images or Flickr. Images on Google are not necessarily available for use as they are most often subject to copyright restrictions. If you use Flickr, you are able to search for images under the Creative Commons License. Creative Commons images often allow users to freely use them on their websites or personally as long as the creator of the work is attributed.

Though these major resources are free to use, they do have some drawbacks. Amongst the drawbacks are the quality of images and also the quantity you have to sift through in order to find one that fits, even with their advanced search features.

Using Stock Photography

Stock photography used to be know only to those in the advertising trade or graphics departments in major firms. The rise and rise of digital photography and of course the digital world of the Internet has brought more and more stock photography sites to more and more markets.

I won’t go into all the ins and outs of using stock photography, but the major factor that increased the use of stock images was the ability to purchase Royalty Free images.

Royalty Free images were lower in cost, and gave purchasers the freedom re-use them for any purpose, providing the licence you bought covered it. Still later developments, including micro stock photography sites brought the prices down even further. With these sites you can download images for pennies.

A number of Micro stock agencies as well as traditional stock photography sites are now attempting to compete with popular image sharing sites by offering a selection of their images for free. They realize that digital photography has increased the sheer number of available images that can be used, especially for online purposes. Where once companies or ad agencies would purchase images for thousands, large multi-nationals are picking up quality images for nothing on photo-sharing sites like Flickr.

Use images to give your posts extra zing

Why should you use images to give your posts that little bit extra? Well, images help to do the following

• capture your readers attention (or even re-focus it).
• break up large areas of text giving the eyes and brain more stimulation
• illustrate a point, concept or headline, add extra emphasis

Magazines and newspapers and lots of other printed media use them in articles, it worked for them, why not you? Additionally, and this may be because I am a photographer, but photographs or images can actually help you create more blog posts.

Public Domain / Free Stock Photography

Wikipedia has a large list of public domain or free image resources (see external links below) and there are quite a few sites that offer free to use (ie little or no restrictions on usage) photographs, images and visuals for your blog. I regularly use the following sites

• Open Photo Project
• Stock Xchng
• Flickr (search Creative commons images)
• Public Domain Pictures

Public domain images require no attribution and are usually out of copyright, however always check this. As with Free stock photography, always check the license to ensure you comply with any restricts. It is always good practice as well, where possible to attribute the photo to it’s creator.

Creative Writing Strategy: NaNoWriMo

As a creative writing strategy, I took a look at NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month. It is a creative writing project, started way back in 1999 with 21 participants. Held in the month of November every year, participants in NaNoWriMo aim to write 50,000 words in 30 days. According to the NaNoWriMo website last years event had over 100,000 participants with over 15,000 people reaching the finish line.

If you want to stay true to your dreams and write a book, then the strategy of writing with all abandon for 30 days may be one way of achieving it especially if you’re a procrastinating type.

Write, Write, Write

If you choose to use this strategy, you must write. 1667 words per day, for 30 days in order to reach the target 50,000 words. No editing, just writing. The point is to achieve the word count. Use your time to churn out your book or partial book. This creative writing exercise aims to get you into the practice of writing consistently over a prolonged period of time.

The method has it’s detractors, most notably amongst the grammar and structure police, but I think they miss the point of the whole exercise. The people who will find this strategy most useful are those who are perhaps making their first attempt at writing a book. Perhaps they have written short stories, or attended writing courses or entered writing contests.

Creative writing courses and workshops all to some degree operate timed writing exercises where you just write, perhaps for 15 minutes, maybe more. It works. It really does. You may read what you have written afterwards and shudder at your spelling or grammar, but the reality is that you have the beginnings of a piece of work that can be fine tuned at a later stage.

NaNoWriMo is about achieving a major writing goal

A novella is a book that has up to 40,000 words. At 50,000 you’ve definitely written a novel or are well on your way. The WriMo philosophy enables you to hunker down and write to a deadline. It’s possible to move WriMo to another month (there is JanNoWriMo going on right now). You could get your writers ring or group to establish your own WriMo sometime later in the year, the possibilities are endless really. Just do it! Write, write write a book.

Photo © Juan Antonio Ruiz G�mez for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike

Finding your photography niche

Finding your photography niche is not an easy job, especially if you like different types of photography. Have you had much luck finding a photography niche that has been enjoyable as well as profitable? Why not tell others about it?

I enjoy doing portrait photography and will continue to focus on this as I build my photography practice, however I would like to hear from others. Perhaps you can help someone who is newly starting out to build their reputation in a photography niche that they enjoy

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