Liberate Media PR celebrate

There was a big turn out for Liberate Media's first birthday party in Soho on Thursday night.

A smattering of technology and social networking cognoscienti from New Media Age, BBC Technology Online, Creative, Pushbutton.tv, Spannerworks, and many more raised a glass to Wendy McAuliffe and Lloyd Gofton at Liberate Media PR for their first year in business.

Journa-list, an online resource by subject and author

Thanks to Bobbie Johnson in Technology Guardian for drawing attention to Journa-list currently in beta.

It aims to be a collection of online journalism currently being written in the UK.

Search by name or topic and see cloud-style the most covered topics.

Welcome to Westmonster

Thanks to Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK for news of a new professional blog publisher in the UK called MessyMedia formed earlier in September by Lloyd Shepherd, formerly of Guardian Unlimited and Yahoo Europe, and Andrew Levy, formerly of Yahoo Europe.

MessyMedia's first blog 'Westmonster' focusses on British politics and is described as irreverent, clued-up and scurrilous. It is edited by 'Westminster insider' Sadie Smith.

Shepherd said: “There's a yawning gap in British political coverage, between the established media, which have fallen into the “us-and-them” trap, and the partisan political blogs like Iain Dale's Diary and Guido Fawkes."

TechCrunch UK relaunch and Seedcamp winners

In November 2006 TechCrunch UK and Ireland launched with Sam Sethi as publisher and Mike Butcher as editor bringing much needed focus to the UK tech start up scene.

Just one month later Le Web 3.0 conference organised by Loic le Meur in Paris sparked off a series of 'misunderstandings' that led to Michael Arrington editor of the US parent site effectively shutting down TechCrunch UK. Much heat was generated in the blogosphere about who said what and why.

Following the suspension of TechCrunch UK, Sam Sethi and Mike Butcher worked together at Vecosys, then separated to run their own tech blogs at blognation launched 8 weeks ago (currently in 9 countries) and Mbites respectively.

So to bring things up to date it is refreshing to see Techcrunch UK up and running again with Mike Butcher once more working with Mike Arrington. The important stuff is after all spotlighting new tech in the UK rather than the individuals blogging about it.

This week Techcrunch UK covered Seedcamp and focused on the 6 winners that each received €50k of funding :
First up is Project Playfair, a Scottish project still in development described as "hypertext for numbers";
next is Zemanta, a 'content intelligence platform' from Slovenia;
Kublax is a hyper-encrypted personal finance application syncing all your bank accounts and utilities in one user-friendly place;
Swedish Tablefinder is an online restaurant searching and booking service;
UK-based Buildersite is a trusted marketplace for construction services based on 5% of the project fee;
Lastly is rentmeonline which has been described an eBay for renters.

If anyone has inside info, or experience of using the applications mentioned here share your thoughts on them below.

3D fly-through a social network

Beautiful visualisation via infosthetics and Open showing the network relationships of groups, members and content, plus the 'long tail' gets a mention.

New York Times on the iPhone hype

David Pogue of The New York Times looks at the features of the new iPhone, as furtively as possible.

Sam Sethi launches Blognation across 16 countries

Today ex-TechCrunchUK publisher, and more recently Vecosys editor Sam Sethi launches his ambitious Blognation network covering the startup/ web 2.0 space.

With 16 editors onboard already Blognation will initially launch in : United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Denmark Portugal, Italy, Iceland, Netherlands, Japan, China / Taiwan / Hong Kong, Australia, Brazil, South America.

Deliberately the US is not being covered by Blognation as Sam says 'because there are already enough excellent blogs reporting on the start-up ecosystem over there and one more wouldn’t make the slightest difference.'

Future expansion of Blognation is planned to cover Canada, Russia, India, South Africa, South Korea, South-East Asia, Poland, Czech Republic, Turkey and Greece.

Blognation's About Us page states ' blognation is backed by undisclosed venture capital funding, by vendor advertising and through affiliate advertising.'



Best of luck Sam and to all involved.