Stuart Dredge

What I've been up to lately

This blog needs a bit of love - I'm supposed to do this for a living. But doing it for a living seems to get in the way of doing it for self-promotion...

Anyway, this is just an update on the kind of stuff I've been writing, and who I've been writing it for. My two main jobs at the moment are still Music Ally and Mobile Entertainment, with additional freelance work for Pocket Gamer, Recombu, What Mobile and recently a few pieces for the Sunday Times.

Such as... for Music Ally, I've been working on their subscription-based daily bulletin and fortnightly report, while also blogging about Google, MySpace and Facebook's music plans, Nokia's Comes With Music subscriber numbers, Spotify's new music-buying features, and the new Sky Songs music service.

What I do, and who I do it for

Today is a bit of a reboot, work-wise, so I thought I'd quickly explain.

I'm starting a new freelance retainer editing the website of Mobile Entertainment magazine, focusing on news, interviews and analysis of the mobile content and apps industry.

It's an exciting role, covering everything from games, music and TV/video through to social media, apps and 3D holographic augmented reality location services. Well, most of those.

I'm continuing in my role handling editorial duties for Music Ally, the music industry consultancy. That means their daily news bulletin, blog and fortnightly report.

I have my own new project too. It's called iPhone Games Bulletin, and it's a daily news and analysis email for the iPhone games industry: developers, publishers, tech providers, VCs, analysts... It's free to receive, so if you're interested in the area, sign up here.

Update on me, myself and I

I really am not much cop at updating my own blog. No excuse really, apart from being wall-to-wall with other stuff.

Anyway, as you may guess from the photo, there's a new addition to the family: Alexander was born earlier this month, and I'm currently nearing the end of my paternity leave (ie in freelance terms, two weeks of not getting paid for anything). All going well so far, Alex seems v chilled - he's sleeping in my arms as I write this on an iPhone. That's modern fatherhood for you.

Work-wise, I've been doing the next PocketGamer.biz report, which is due to be finished in the next couple of weeks. Music Ally has been busy with lots of big stories, and I'm also going to be contributing to the new mobile-focused site Recombu, which is being launched by Andrew Lim here in the UK soon.

That's about it really, I should think of more stuff to say on here, and even a proper purpose for it. One day...

Pain in the back-end

Life was easier in the days when I just had to write words, but was it more rewarding?

I realised the other day that I frequently spend as much time fiddling about with my stories in various publishing back-ends as I do actually writing them. Even a simple ten-minute press release write-up can involve a further ten minutes of digging through sites for links, inserting said links, resizing and uploading pics, setting categories... And that's without mentioning the follow-up promo tasks on big stories.

Sometimes it's hard not to wish I (or rather the sites I write for) had someone to Do This Stuff For Me. Imagine how many stories I could do a day...

But most of the time I realise this is just what you have to do nowadays - part of the skillset of an online journalist. There are thousands of bloggers to whom it's second nature who'd do it if I got arsey... Although some of the tasks listed above can be a bit of a grind when there's another story to move onto, nailing a story with all of these elements and seeing it go live does feel rewarding.

As long as the back-end is working properly, of course, and doesn't fall over losing all those (hopefully) well-crafted words that kickstarted the process. Buy that's another post...

Another long break between blog posts

As a vaguely rubbish excuse, I've been blogging / writing lots for other people, but that's not really an excuse for neglecting your own blog, especially when it's supposed to be a professional shop window (of sorts).

So, as a quick update. I've been hard at work for Steel Media, writing features for Pocket Gamer, editing/writing their new PocketGamer.biz industry site, and editing the latest issue of the Pocket Gamer print magazine, which goes out in three separate editions for T-Mobile, Vodafone and 3 UK, with two more clients joining for the new issue.

Meanwhile, I'm also doing more work for Music Ally. Besides writing their daily bulletin (sample here), I've been working more on their fortnightly report - in both cases covering the latest developments in digital music (both online and mobile).

Plus I'm still doing the odd freelance feature - recently including a piece on mobile usability for New Media Age, and a piece on ad-funded mobile content for Mobile Media. And I'm contributing some posts for PopJunkie, a new music blog set up by Ashley Norris (ex Shiny Media) and some friends.

It's a busy time, in other words! If I'm lax in replying to your emails and/or voicemails, that's why, and I apologise. What with all that work, driving lessons and a cheerful toddler who's just learned which room in the house his dad works in, keeping on top of communications can sometimes slip.

Do British bloggers have an inferiority complex?

My heart sank this afternoon while reading this TechCrunch UK article and its related comments. Written by Ashley Norris, my old boss at Shiny Media, the post itself is an interesting look at the challenges facing anyone trying to build a UK blog network. But the comments swiftly descend into a.) Shinybashing and b.) tech blogger infighting.

I'll keep out of the latter, since I know and like all the people involved. But I do have some thoughts on the UK blogs v US blogs thing. Mainly: why do we beat ourselves up for this so much? US blogs and blog networks are bigger, have much more traffic, and make much more money. Why? Because they've been doing it longer, have more internet users to target, and have more VCs flinging cash their way.

So what? Comparing the younger UK blogging market to that can only ever make us feel inferior. Yet we still do it. When I was at Tech Digest, I got sucked into it myself - comparing ourselves to sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, and fretting over how they got so much traffic, and why their stories got shedloads more Diggs than ours, and generally feeling a bit down about why we weren't closing the gap faster.

Leipzig-bound

Just making final preparations (i.e. arranging 700 interviews in a panic) for the Games Convention show in Leipzig next week. If you're a mobile games company attending, do pop me a line if you fancy saying hello.

Also starting work on a feature for New Media Age on premium mobile services - are consumers still associating TV voting and/or content subscriptions with being ripped off? Are there still rip-off merchants out there? Should the mobile industry be doing more to stamp them out? And so on.

Have also just been sent this link today - Ping.fm - apparently lets you update all your social networks from one place, so you only have to type in 'my cat is sleeping and I'm eating a ham sandwich' once. It's The Future! Maybe.

Sample Music Ally Bulletin

Every day I write a bulletin for music industry consultancy Music Ally, which is sent out by email to their paying subscribers. It's a digest of the latest news in digital music and related areas, which is in people's inboxes by 9.30am every morning.

Since it's not archived online, I've reproduced a recent one below, so you can see what it's like. You can sign up for the Music Ally service here (it also includes a fortnightly report that goes into more depth). The sample bulletin is from Friday 1st August 2008, although the real thing is more nicely formatted in HTML.