Today we’ve launched a project at Rabbit which I’m really excited about – No Tech Day for our charity client Practical Action.

Practical Action do great help-them-help-themselves work using simple and innovative technology in developing countries, for example Play Pump – a water pump powered by children playing… How cool is that?! More info on their projects here.

No Tech Day is particularly exciting for me because it evolved from something that happened to me, a certified gadget addict, over Christmas. My mum was so fed up with me checking my iPhone at the dinner table (don’t judge me – I bet you’ve done it too) that she challenged me to go without the internet for a week. A WEEK. Actually, it was more of a bribe as there was a £200 reward for my compliance.

Before that week, I honestly can’t remember the last time I went so long without email, Google, Twitter, Facebook… even Spotify was banned. It shames me to say it but I found myself involuntarily firing up Tweetdeck, or clicking on Firefox, a good few times before I realised I was having a No Net Week. I remember a conversation with my mum about email, and wondering how people really worked before email. To me, a life without technology is incomprehensible.

Yet for those in the developing world it is a reality. Every day, not just for one day or a week. What’s really struck me about working on this campaign is not the lack of access to what we might call basic technology like toilets and electric lights, but the lack of what you might call ‘work technology’ – computers, internet, phones etc. Because without these, developing countries are limited to the type of work they can do.

Practical Action is the kind of charity I like, and I’m proud to be working with, because there’s no hard-hitting emotional guilt but real, pragmatic answers to specific problems. And of course, being a huge geek, I like their focus on tech!

So you won’t be hearing from me on Saturday as I’ll be doing my No Tech Day. If you’d like to get involved check out notechday.org.

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

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Oze1rFWqlw

Posted via email from Louise’s posterous

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-feat-pet-shop-boys-little-boots-matter-the-o2-10709/3853#more-3853

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:

Book Review: The New Erotic Photography
Book Review: Do it Yourself/
Book Review: I’ll Be Watching You

(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):

Album Review: Chemically Imbalanced by the Ying Yang Twins
Album Review: Concrete Jungle by Ch’ill Crew

And hopefully more on the way…

Posted via email from Louise’s posterous

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.

It 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.

Posted via email from Louise’s posterous

In preparation for my new year’s resolution to blog a bit more I have been sorting out my online life. louisedoherty.com has had a quick nip-tuck, I’ve finally joined Twitter.com, and I’ve been getting to grips with RSS feeds to get my daily news, views and fun (incidentally, my new WordPress theme cleverly makes a louisedoherty.com RSS automatically – here)

Also, I’ve set up my iPhone to do all of the above so I can blog, tweet or get news on the go. I feel, as my mum likes to call it, ‘techno’d up.’

I’ve also been experimenting with PR via Twitter. I don’t think my boss is convinced yet, but we’ve got 5 followers in one day! I’m using twitterfeed.com to auto-post the news collected by housepricecrash.co.uk members (and turned into an RSS) to a dedicated Twitter account. Confused? It basically means the news on housepricecrash.co.uk can be automatically seen on Twitter by anyone who should wish it so.

Worst case scenario: no one cares. Middling scenario: we get more members because more people are exposed to the site.
Best case scenario: the journalists on Twitter see the updates, write about the site or get in touch for an interview or quote.

Incidentally, I chose housepricecrash.co.uk as the Twitter guinea pig because its members are pretty passionate, web-literate and vocal. Just check the forum.

I’ll be putting a link to @housepricecrash on the housepricecrash.co.uk homepage when its new design is launched later this week, which should boost housepricecrash.co.uk in the Twittersphere.

So, my BBC South East Today interview in London yesterday was, predictably, outside in the wind and rain, though not as bad as my first interview. luckily you’ll never see it because it wasn’t recorded :)

But, the point of the story is that the journalist who interviewed me should be sacked. In an attempt to avoid not knowing the answer to a question like on GMTV last week, I asked what the questions might cover. Her response, and I quote, “oh I don’t really know. To be honest, I didn’t write the questions and I haven’t even looked at them. I don’t know anything about the story, I’ve just come down to ask the questions.”

Great help. Not only was it annoying because it meant that I had to think on my feet when she asked something I didn’t know, but mainly it winds me up that the BBC employ such useless people when there are so many people who would kill to have her job.

Before I started at Fubra, Brendan told me that journalists are inherently lazy and all need to be shot. Or something to that effect. And I stood up for them, arguing that the majority properly research and balance stories, and that he was being unfair. Having been on the receiving end of calls from journos asking how many litres are in a gallon (what, Google too difficult?), asking for info I already sent them but they couldn’t be bothered to read, and generally not appreciating the jobs they’ve got, I have to say I tend to agree with him.