Writing for life

I’ve made a few changes over on the CJ Writing website to more accurately reflect the SEO copywriting and web content consultancy work I’m doing with businesses these days.

I’ve also included a business related, web-content focussed blog as part of the site re-vamp, and will be posting business related missives there, rather than here, from now on.

This will remain, as always, a personal blog that I’ll use to post all sorts of whimsical bits and pieces that cross my mind, and of course the occasional bout of spleen-venting when the Irish system gets even more frustrating than usual.

The business blog will have a much more practical focus, with hints, tips and suggestions on how to make your web content work harder for your business. I’m also experimenting with a pre-pay Web Content Audit service, and pre-pay Web Content Consultancy packages.

The idea is to help small to medium businesses to fine-tune their web content and keep control of their costs by pre-purchasing the advice and help they need… eliminating the spectre of looming invoices when cash-flow is tight. Of course it also means I get to spend more of my time helping my clients rather than chasing payments.

I think it’s a system that could work well for all concerned. I guess time will tell whether it will catch on or not.

If things have gone a bit quiet here of late it’s because I’m busy working on a follow up book to Understanding Digital Marketing… another collaboration with my co-author Damian Ryan.

The new book… dubbed “The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World – mastering the art of customer engagement”… is coming together nicely, but the deadline for delivery of the finished manuscript to our publishers Kogan Page is imminent.

So, it’s all hands on deck in a mad scramble to pull the everything together… and that means precious little time for anything else… including this blog, other websites, my various social media accounts and sundry other projects I have on the go. I will do my best to post the occasional update here over the coming month or so, but things are likely to be pretty frantic.

Some recent arrivals on the dairy farm next door… shot using available light (scarce enough in the shed in question), hand-held. Nothing that special as a photograph… but posting it here because of the undeniable “Ahhh” factor .

Walking on Long Strand the other day we doubled back across the dunes and back along the road. It’s a conservation area, and to promote plant biodiversity they have horses grazing the dunes over the winter. I looked up and saw these two cresting a large dune, silhouetted against the overcast sky.

I haven’t posted any photos for a while. Just going through some of my shots of a trip to Scotland during all the snow in January, and thought I’d post a couple of them up here to share.

This is a willow tree outside our apartment looking out over Loch Rannoch… real winter wonderland stuff.

…and this is a shot of Schiehallion taken from the banks of Loch Rannoch early one morning. It was the only day we saw the mountain; for the rest of our trip it was shrouded with low cloud.

Image by Emilie Ogez via Flickr

As words go procrastination has to be one of the best. I like the way it rolls around on your tongue, taking, as you might expect, a little longer than necessary to get itself out. It’s a word that lingers, without really knowing why.

Putting things off is something most normal people do as a matter of course. Unless a task absolutely needs to be done now we’ll typically set it aside and do it later, focussing instead on what we feel is more immediately compelling. Psychologists, as is their wont, weave a complex tapestry of theoretical meaning around people’s very natural tendency to defer things until tomorrow. They call it procrastination, and describe it as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety of making a decision or starting any task.

But who in their right mind pays much attention to psychologists? They’re masters at taking perfectly natural human behaviour, sticking it in a box, adding a fancy label and attributing it to potentially serious underlying mental health issues. They’re so good at it because they spend an awful lot of time doing it… time they could easily allocate to more productive work, but choose not to. Sounds very like procrastination in action to me.

According to the psychologists then, procrastination stems from issues of anxiety, a low sense of self-worth, and a self-defeating mentality; too much of it, they maintain, can be a symptom of underlying mental health conditions like depression or ADHD. What a load of old cobblers!

Image via Wikipedia

For the last seven years… give or take a month or two… I’ve been writing a weekly column for the cork based Evening Echo, one of Ireland’s leading regional newspapers.

Last week I got a call from John Dolan, the Echo’s features editor, to inform me that after a New Year review of their operations they’d decided to stop a number of long running columns from external contributors… mine included.

Given the plight of regional newspapers as they battle dwindling ad revenue and struggle to compete with ever more attractive and increasingly measurable online marketing options, this was hardly a surprise… but it was a bit sad.

If I’m honest it was something of a bitter-sweet moment for me. The column has been a part of my life for so long now that not having to write it every week will be strange… and of course there’s the fact that it leaves a hole in the monthly finances that I’ll have to plug, but I’d been feeling for some time that the column had run it’s course.

It was getting harder to sustain the momentum. When you’ve been writing on the same subject (a father’s perspective on parenting) for nearly seven years it can be difficult to break new ground… and while a good writer will always manage to keep things fresh for the reader, the process of writing becomes a bit stale. You stop enjoying it as much, it requires more effort and becomes less rewarding.

So, onwards and upwards to bigger and brighter things, I guess.

Now… anyone out there fancy paying me to write a weekly online marketing / social media column, or perhaps something on Ireland’s Wildlife.

Go on… make me an offer .

My very last column will run in the WOW! supplement of tomorrow’s Evening Echo (Wed 03/02/2010)… and will be posted here shortly thereafter.

In the wake of the spectacular humpback whale encounters off the Wexford coast recently, and the incredible footage shown on the RTÉ news, the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG) is calling for funding to help them find out more about the humpback whales that visit Ireland’s coastline every year.

We’re incredibly lucky to have these amazing animals, and other large whale species, as regular visitors to our shores, and finding out more about them is a crucial step to the conservation of these magnificent animals.

I’ll let Dr. Simon Berrow of the IWDG explain:

I hope you have all got to the see the amazing images and footage of the humpback whale off Co. Wexford. Hopefully too, some of you will be able to go and see this magnificent creature for yourselves.  It might not breach, but humpback whales are still one of the most enigmatic and popular species on the planet.

This is the 11th individual humpback whale the IWDG have recorded in Irish waters.  All previous whales have been photographed in more than one year and although this is the first time we have recorded this one, we fully expect to see this whale again !  This shows that humpback whales are returning to Ireland each year where they are spending a considerable period of time, but we do not know if they are passing through on their way to somewhere else or where they go when they leave.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve never really understood the attraction of intentionally putting yourself into a damp, cold, dark place to defy death in pursuit of fun and discovery.

Call me boring, but I can get all the damp, cold and dark that I’m likely to need in a lifetime on a typical winter’s day down in West Cork. The prospect of gearing up from head-to-toe in an array of protective clobber, donning a headlamp and descending into the bowels of the earth for the privilege doesn’t exactly fill me with glee. But it does some people, evidently… like the members of the Speleological Union of Ireland (SUI), or cavers to you and me. These are people who routinely give up their weekends to go pottering about underground… voluntarily… for enjoyment.

On their very impressive website (www.caving.ie) they court potential recruits with this enticing opening gambit:

Caving is the exploration of natural underground spaces. It is an adventure sport with inherent risks; many caves are cold or wet or muddy, or all three.

Sorry, you haven’t managed to grab me there… try again.

Technically potholes are caves that include vertical drops and therefore require the use of ropes and or ladders…

Nope… sorry, still not really getting it.