Yesterday news broke that the London Google HQ had caught fire. Thankfully for all Googlers involved (and the safety of the interwebz) no one was hurt – it was a small fire on the roof terrace which started when a tree caught fire during a lunchtime BBQ.

Twitter was set alight (sorry…) with posts, Twitpics, quick quips and speculation, but the comment by @chiefchimpanzee made me laugh out loud.

I fired up Photoshop (Pixelmator actually), emailed my Gmail account a handful of fire-related words, grabbed the contextual ads on the side of my inbox, mashed them onto the original photo and sent my creation into the ether.

Just because it made me giggle.

It seems it made a few other people giggle too – it was picked up by the The Telegraph and Techcrunch

 

So, during my lunch today I popped on to Facebook to see what my friends were up to.
 
In my news feed, I spot this:

This has got to be one of the worst attempts at brand promotion via social media that I've discovered first hand. Silverberg Opticians' comment is totally irrelevant to Mike's status. This is tantamount to spam.
 
In a way, I think it's worse than the Habitat Twitter hashtag spam debacle, because in order to for them to post this Mike had to become a friend of Silverberg Opticians (their profile is not a fan page) to grant them the permission to comment on his status. They are abusing the fact that he's let them into his profile.
 
They might as well track him down in the pub and start trying to sell him glasses while he's mid estate-agent-bashing with his mates.
 
On a practical note, even if Silverberg Opticians' comment was relevant, they still haven't maximised the effort they've gone to to make it. They've put a link to their website, but apparently don't know that if they want people to be able to click directly through from their comment (which would undoubtedly boost the number of visits as a result of their 'marketing') then they need to include the 'http://' Without that Facebook (and Twitter for that matter) will just treat it as any other text.
 
And don't even get me started on the multiple exclamation marks!!!
 
I can't think on anything positive about what they've done, apart from the fact that they're trying. But is a half-hearted or misguided attempt better than none when you're invading online personal space?

For the past few days I've been working on creating an overview video for Clear Books - an online accounting software system, and one of the companies that Fubra have invested in.
 
When we decided to do the video I got really excited... "Yes!" I thought. "This is what I'm good at!" I did a fair bit of video editing as part of my broadcast journalism degree, so I assumed it would be a doddle, and fun.
 
Wrong.
 
It turns out that actually, editing screen casts together is much harder than filming real people and cutting that up. All the tricks you use to keep viewers entertained go out the window. Couple that with the fact that I had to learn to use ScreenCast (pretty straightforward, definitely recommended) and iMovie (tricky when you're used to the extra features of Final Cut/Premier Pro) over night, and throw in a ton of technical anomalies just for fun, and I nearly threw my beloved MacBook out the window on several occasions.
 
It's not perfect, but it's the first in a series of versions of it, and I hope each will get progressively better. But for now, here it is:
 

I'm trying to get back into writing. Non work-related stuff I mean. I used to do a lot of music writing, but it all kind of fell by the way when I was hit by the dazzling bright lights of PR.

 But I want to start again. So, with that in mind, a while back I contacted the wittiest music blog around, MyChemicalToilet.com, to offer myself up as a reviewer (free gigs FTW!). I'm pleased to say that the fruits of my first labour, a gig review of... well, an interesting night, have been published today.

 "Once inside it became clear that this wasn’t some shoddy, lazily-organised corporate wank-off for social meeja, internet-y types. Aside from headliners Pet Shop Boys, Little Boots and Hot Chip there were mixology lessons, a digital graffitti wall, a fortune teller, X-rated bingo and a tattoo parlour for punters to get a semi-permanent reminder of the night. Mine (a classy rose on my left breast) turned out to be rather more permanent than I expected, still very visible at the gym the next day despite hours of scrubbing."

 The full post is here:

 http://mychemicaltoilet.com/can-you-gig-it-smirnoff-experience-ur-the-night-f...

 It reminded me of some of the other things I wrote that are still lurking around on the interwebs... Some bits for Men's Health:

 http://www.menshealth.co.uk/Down-time/Review%3A-The-New-Erotic-Photography/v2
http://www.menshealth.co.uk/Down-time/Review%3A-Do-it-yourself/v2
http://www.menshealth.co.uk/Down-time/Review%3A-I%E2%80%99ll-be-watching-you/v2

 (Yes, the top 2 are basically porn, but it was so they could use the pictures online and bring in web traffic... sigh...)

 And some stuff for the excellent music/lifestyle mag LeftLion in Nottingham (my uni days):

 http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm?id=1638
http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm?id=1674

 And hopefully more on the way...

I've recently signed up for a new, free service, Posterous.com.

 It's basically blogging, via email. All the cool kids are using it these days, and not one to be left out, I'm giving it a go.

 I doesn't (yet) have the customisability that Wordpress does, since you can't change your theme or add plug ins, but its a great simple design. Check mine out:

 http://louisedoherty.posterous.com/

 Ok, so it's a little sparse, but the thing that really appeals to me is that it can auto-update a number of other services. With just an email! I've linked my Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (not that I've used that yet) and Wordpress.

 So here's hoping - this is me, blogging on www.louisedoherty.com, by sending an email.

So, Posterous looks really interesting. I've decided to set up an account and have a play.

 Hmmm.