Bloggers' Perks - going to a fashion showcase

Occasionally I get invited to interesting events on the back of having a blog. One of these instances happened almost a month ago when I was invited to the JD Williams and SimplyBe showcase of the upcoming fashion stories for Spring Summer 2018. It's not normally the kind of stuff I cover here on my blog but as I was in the West End that day anyway, I thought I'd pop over and see what they had on offer.

My first career was in fashion retail. I spent the best part of 10 years in a management role in both standalone stores in Worcester, Birmingham and London and in concessions within Selfridges and House of Fraser. An even before that, I has more than a healthy interest in fashion and clothing as I started making my own clothes at the tender age of 10. I still love textiles and the craft of making things, although I don't have as much time to devote to it these days as I'd like.

It's more than 20 years since I last worked on the shop floor but it's ingrained in me. One of those formative experiences that shapes who you are without you realising it. One of the assistants showed me around the different collections and explained how the pieces sat together and then left me to have a browse. And I was taken back to the early 1990s and working on the fashion floors of various London department stores. And just like I did back then, I spent quite a bit of my time people-watching. That was possibly the best bit. Oh and the gorgeous lavender lemonade.

I don't really go clothes shopping any more. I spent so long working in fashion that I accumulated a large wardrobe and stopped enjoying shopping for clothes as a pastime. It's fun to do occasionally, but it's certainly not how I want to spend my weekends any more. Plus, I still have way too many clothes due to a love of bargain hunting for interesting fashion pieces on eBay. So this made a welcome change.

For the ladies reading this, and those buying for the ladies in their lives, here's what's in for next season according to JD Williams and SimplyBe. 

• Acid brights with denim and white. Lots of embroidery and folk styles. Hippy style blouses and tops. Embellished jeans with embroidery or chunky laces on the outer seams. Lace edges and braid trims.
• Neutrals. Classic tones in beige, pale grey, cream and off white in silky fabrics. Simple, elegant styling that are easy to wear and easy to mix and match. Fantasy tweed in white with flecks is in and I spotted a lovely fantasy tweed handbag in a Chanel style but not at Chanel prices. Also I saw duster coats and long line jackets - the kind of which I haven't seen since the 1990s.
• Florals of all kinds in blouses, dresses and the pyjama style unstructured suit is still a thing. 
• Denim everything. Double denim, even triple denim. Pale and dark denim. I saw denim shirts, jeans, shirt dresses, jackets - jeans jacket style and also a quilted and embroidered bomber jacket in denim. My favourite denim piece was a trench style coat.
• Cashmere and silk casual wear in grey, black and cream. My favourite was a cashmere mix two piece of knitted culottes and loose v-neck sweater. There were also some lovely ponchos and loose knits that looked both stylish and cosy to wear.
• Summer sequins for day wear. Lots of them in both neutrals and acid brights. These were seen on tops and dresses in both the JD Williams and the SimplyBe collections. 

What I liked about the clothes I saw was that they were wearable, reasonably priced and didn't scream 'fashion trend' at you. What the fit or comfort levels are like, I don't know as these were all samples and not available to try on. The finish quality looked good though, especially for the price tags.

I didn't take many photos, but the few I did take are in the collection below. Click on the image to see them. The non-fashion images are of the art and lighting in the foyer of the building. Most impressive.

Thank you to JD Williams and SimplyBe for having me.

Day 17/25 Blogmas

It was my 11th Twitter birthday yesterday

I've been a member since 15th December 2006. Eleven years. I was one of the early adopters in the UK. This is how it happened.

The calm before the storm
London Tech Christmas Party December 2006

I was part of the London Tech community's Christmas 'Mega Bash' of 2006 led by Ian Forrester of BBC Backstage. The idea was to get all the London tech community groups together and to have a big Christmas bash on Saturday 9 December 2006. Swedish Beers was one of the groups involved alongside London Girl Geekdinners, Geekdinners, London Perlmongers, London Webstandards Group, London Ruby user group, Open rights group, London 2.0, Mobile Monday, LondonSEO. Of those, Swedish Beers is definitely still going strong with no sign of letting up any time soon (I hope).

The sponsors on the night fared better. Trusted Places went to Yell. SkillsMatter, Chinwag, TechCrunch UK, and O'Reilly are all still around in one form or another. AdMob sold to Google for megabucks. And Connect Me Anywhere was the precursor to Iovox.

Twitter didn't quite make the grade as a full-on sponsor, but they were involved in some way. It's a long time ago. I can't remember the detail. There was some Twitter activity that night, but I hadn't been organised enough to sign up to the service. And in all honesty, I really couldn't see the point of micro-blogging. I'd been doing long-form blogging for 3 years at that point and I'd been an active member of Flickr since 2005 and even had a PRO account so I could store more photos. That was my social network of choice at the time. We used that and Moblog a bit like Instagram is used now except we took our photos on our mobile or cameras and uploaded via desktop or laptop computer.  My business networking was done on Soflow, Ecademy and LinkedIn. So I could see the point of social networking (although we didn't call it that then), but microblogging? Yeah, wasn't so sure on that one.


I took some nudging from Ian to get signed up to Twitter. I did it as a favour to him after the party to help him meet his obligations to Twitter. And in those early days, I really couldn't see the point so I wasn't particularly active. And my first tweets don't reveal very much of note either. Also at the time, Twitter wasn't market leader. We also had Jaiku and Pownce. Jaiku has more functionality. I seem to remember Pownce having some weird USP that I can't quite remember, but they were both also about micro-blogging.

Fast forward to February 2007, and it's 3GSM in Barcelona - what is now Mobile World Congress. Twitter is integrated with SMS and you could do things like create an interest group and everyone in the group would receive the messages via SMS. You could post and receive via SMS for free as well. In Barcelona, on roaming, and many of us on the same mission to find out where the action was at 3GSM, Twitter suddenly had a purpose. The most similar thing to that now would be a WhatsApp or WeChat Group. Now I got the point. We could share messages with each other easily and for free. We could find out about what was going on and get answers to questions. All useful stuff. And now, all superseded by other services.

It's fair to say that for a few years I was an enthusiastic Twitter user. I met many people via Twitter. Engaged in the offline Twitter meet-ups and I met new clients via Twitter as well. It was still small enough that you could keep track of the people you were following and in turn, you could be found and make an impression. Most people still couldn't see the point of it so it stayed in the category of quality not quantity in those days.

But as the masses joined in, the usefulness and relevance for me decreased. And for the last few years, I've hardly used it at all. Facebook and LinkedIn have taken over in usefulness and reach for me - particularly the former, even for business-related content.

But, I'm still there and I'm using it a bit more again since I picked up the blogging pace this November. It's harder work because of the volume of stuff to wade through. And I'm not sure how much reach I get from Twitter. My blog stats say Google and Facebook are my main drivers of traffic with Twitter barely showing a blip these days. But maybe that will change now that I'm a bit more engaged. These platforms have a way of ebbing and flowing over time. And maybe now that Twitter is not quite as micro-blogging as before, it will make a difference.

If you'd like to relive that London Tech Mega Christmas Bash 2006, you can do that here. And if you're feeling brave, you can check out the photos. We certainly look younger, but so many of the photos are deeply, deeply unflattering!

Day 16/25 Blogmas

The Future of Blogging and Communications - some thoughts

I went to an interesting panel discussion on Thursday evening in London at WeWork near Old Street. It was organised by the #BlogClub team and the session was entitled 'How will AI and other disruptive forces affect and impact the world of blogging and communications?' The panel was led by Andy Bargery and the panellists were Katie King (CEO of Zoodikers and future author of a book on AI and Marketing for Publishers Kogan Page) Katie on Twitter, Lucy Hall (blogger at www.lucyshall.com) Lucy on Twitter, and Minter Dial (co-author of 'Futureproof- How To Get Your Business Ready For The Next Disruption'), Minter on Twitter.

As I've previously done quite a bit of work and thinking around the topic of AI, I was interested to revisit it with a different audience - i.e. not tech experts but writers, both professional and amateur. This made for an interesting evening and provoked me into thinking more deeply about the topic again.

Chatbots
One of the first things to be brought up was Chatbots. I've not had a great experience with Chatbots if I'm brutally honest. I've had a play with the Pizza Express one and the Dr Oetker one. Both crashed on me and both were nothing more than a weak IVR (interactive voice response) in a text format. They both took too long to interact with and what they achieved could have been done much more quickly via a webform or a bunch of tick boxes. The Pizza Express ones have been a bit cuter as it included some animation and video, but ultimately, they're not *that* clever. At least, not yet. Both of these chatbots were on Facebook Messenger.

Robot writing
The discussion moved on to automated writing. The ai-writer.com website was mentioned more than a few times and heralded as 'the future'. There have been robot poets in China, a Japanese robot fiction author who got through the first round in a literary contest, and this year, Google invested in AI to write local news. And I know that data driven news content like sports results, stocks and share information and weather is already automated so it's not so far-fetched to think that anyone who writes for a living may find themselves out of a job in the near future.

But let's not get too carried away with this. I tried ai-writer.com and it was pretty ropey. Check my previous post for an example article or try it for yourself here. Or take a look at Vic Keegan's Shakespeare's Monkey website (pictured above) which has been running for years and years and still it hasn't created anything worthy of a single line of Shakespeare. I realise that Vic's experiment is based on randomness whereas ai-writer's aim is specifically to generate content for blog writers - your only input is the blog title to generate the content.

Let the tools help you not replace you
That's not to say that there are AI tools out there that are very useful indeed, especially to a writer. Google Search being the most obvious one. Even things like AI Writer may have their uses to link to useful resources. There are other tools out there to help you plan your writing, do research for you and help you with readability, translation, distribution, and more. However, where creativity of any kind is a requirement, the human brain still wins out.

Nevertheless, there are a myriad of servers out there generating fake news and pictures and  automating content (that looks little better than gibberish) in order to either manipulate the public in the former and to make cash from advertising in the latter case. I won't touch on all the automated marketing tools, click fraudsters and fake (robot?) eyeballs out there at the moment who make this scenario even worse - I'll save that for another time. It's a big topic.

It did beg the question of what is the point of automated content if it's going to be robots that see it more than humans. Which also begged the question of why should we bother writing at all if it's going to be harder and harder to reach real eyeballs rather than robot ones. 
Minter stated that human + machine is better than machine alone. And in this context, I agree with him. With the tools we have available to us, we are able to do many more things and usually in a faster fashion.

So the good news is that if you're a writer, you still have a job if a creative element is required. Forget it if you're just churning out generic content based on data such as stocks and shares, football results or weather temperatures.

Some thoughts from the panellists

Video
But there are things we need to think about, whether you're involved in online content of any kind. Lucy reminded us that there's more to blogging than just words and that live video was one of the most effective types of content out there at the moment. She believes that's down to the human touch and the popularity of video. Lucy also stressed the importance of keeping up with your audience. They way they access content has changed, writers and content producers need to keep up with that.

Ethics
Katy was excited at the prospect of AI and how it can help us now and in the future with the range of tools available to us. Her caveat was that there is a need for ethics around AI.
I agree that ethics are a requirement and we need more thinkers from all walks of life contributing to the AI conversation so that we can remain human. I don't want our algorithm overlords making decisions about me and what I am able to or not able to do based on data that could be flawed, misinterpreted, wrong and worse still, not fixable because the algorithms become so convoluted or data that is completely out of my control as it's inferred from those around me rather than myself. I wrote last year about social scoring in China and Wired Magazine published an in-depth update recently.

How to futureproof being a writer
Minter's advice was that, as a writer, you need to find your niche and be very specific about it. He also believes strongly that you need to write from the heart  and aim to get energy from your writing. He suggests using the AI tools available to use to help with publishing, distribution, analysis and research. He sees SEO as 'Strategic Executive Opportunity' and said that if money is your objective, then you need to think about how much you will invest in these (AI) technologies.

My takeaway
I came away reassured that creativity is still a human trait that cannot yet effectively be copied by software. Nevertheless, there are tools out there that I could be making use of to improve my writing and help me be more efficient and more effective.
A big thank you to Andy and Bernie of #blogclub.
Day 4/30 NaBloPoMo

Carnival Catch up

If you're interested in things mobile, then the weekly Carnival of the Mobilists is a must-read every week. Each week there's a different host and that week's host does a round-up of the best of the blogs on mobile. I've been catching up on my carnival reading and links to the last few are here:

No 83 is over at the hostess with the mostest, Judy Breck at Golden Swamp
No 82 is over at C Enrique Ortiz's About Mobile blog (love the carnival picture btw).
No 81 has an Egyptian theme over at the relatively new Symbiano-Tek blog.

Blogging can damage your wealth

...or so say a couple of lawyers who specialise in matters blogging. They've put together a list of top tips to keep bloggers within the law when it comes to writing blogs and pretty much writing anything online. The best tip being to avoid 'blog rage'. I concur. If I'm ever suffering blog rage, the way round it is to still write something but never ever ever publish it and never ever let anyone else see it!

Some very good commonsense advice there so worth a read if you ever comment or write anything online, and that's a lot of us these days.

A couple of offers from the folks at Spinvox

I've been a big fan and customer of Spinvox (the visual voicemail people - i.e. the service where your voicemail messages get turned into text messages) pretty much since they launched here in the UK. Well the good news for my Stateside readers is that they've launched their visual voicemail service in the US too. And even better, they're giving away a limited number of free US voicemail accounts valid for one year and guaranteed no spam (I don't know how many are up for grabs, so best be quick if you're interested as they can stop the offer at any time).

So how do you get your mits on one of these accounts then? Well all you have to do is Click on this link to indicate that you are in fact in the United States and then fill out the form. To get the free one year account, you need the 'golden key'... which is where you need to put 'technokitten' in the Company field. If you don't put 'technokitten' in there, you won't get a free account. If you don't do this, you'll just get the free trial rather than a one-year account. You have been warned!

And if that's not enough, Spinvox has also launched their Spin-my-blog service which offers bloggers the opportunity to call in with their blog posts and they automatically get transcripted and posted to your blog. I'm going to be trying this out myself as it seems a really cool idea and a good way to blog when you're out and about. And what's more, they've got some free blog accounts for my readers too. If you're in the UK, then you can click on this link.

If you're in the UK, you'll automatically be set up with a Spin-My-Blog number and then all you have to do is save the numberon your phone and save or remember your PIN and call the number issued whenever you want to use the service. If you're in the US, then Spinvox will be in touch with you to set it up. It looks like the service should also work in Germany, France, Spain and Canada.