Longer version: So it’s been a bit of a time of change recently for me and this here blog. Along with the documented job move, I coded/experimented for the last month or so with a more lifestreamy approach to blogging on another domain. I liked it. I fell in love with it. I deliberated over how to integrate it with the current blog experience here as I wanted the best of both worlds. To run with the dashboard and the blog. I’m greedy like that.

But when it comes to this kinda thing, I’m a great believer of don’t touch what’s working. Which I learnt all too quickly again when over a previous weekend when I made the changes and then realised that after doing so, I’d made a hash of things and absolutely nothing worked. All the links were wrong and I felt like I’d made a huge mistake even touching things that work. I cursed myself for being an idiot. After having a cup of tea and getting it all back on track, I’m pretty happy with the new dashboard style homepage at litmanlive.co.uk and I hope you like it too.

So I moved the blog to a sub page of the site and created an aggregator type dashboard homepage which I absolutely love. Kinda like a visual snapshot of my life online. The articles I’m reading, sharing, writing and loving, all in one place and in near real time.

As an unfortunate consequence of moving things around a bit it would appear that I seem to have messed up the RSS thingmajig and instantly lost all my RSS subscribers because the url has changed and therefore the RSS feed has too. Or at least that’s what I’m assuming. Otherwise I’ll presume that you have a hatred for nice boxes of visuals and/or Dare. Obviously I was a bit disappointed about that as I’d amassed a quite decent number of subscribers but alas, it looks like it couldn’t be prevented.

So if you were reading the blog via RSS, can I ask that you update your RSS feed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/litmanliveblog.

You’ve got a few other choices also if you like. You can subscribe to blog updates via email also. I prefer to do this for any sites I actually want to keep updated by. Or you can now subscribe to the lifestream via RSS / email too to receive everything that I read, share, write and love.

See you soon.

So there you go, I’ve said what I wanted to say for a reasonably long time now, I’m joining Dare. For anyone that knows me, a secret like that is hard to keep. As the ever wise Tom Fishburne shows above, we don’t always know entirely what we’re letting ourselves in for but isn’t that exciting. There’s obviously the fear of the unknown, the change of surroundings and the new people, but leaps of faith have to be taken to move forward, to better myself, to keep me on my toes and to take myself out of my comfort zone. I’ve had a fantastic time with my boss @pbizzle, so this was a tough decision but nonetheless the decision has been made.

Tom describes the image like so:

Most careers are not rung-by-rung linear paths. Instead, they involve a series of flying leaps, not knowing whether those leaps will take you up, down, or sideways. Or if you’ll miss the trapeze altogether. Or if there’s even a net.

It takes courage to take each leap. And patience when you’re not headed the direction you’d like.It takes courage to take each leap.

Thinking about your career in purely a linear way focuses you on all the wrong things and blinds you to the actual experiences along the way. Worst of all, it can make you risk-adverse.

It’s much easier to stand still and be happy where you are and doing what you’re doing. Hey, I am happy where I am and doing what I’m doing. But i’ve always wanted to be constantly developing, being adaptable, taking risks, moving onwards and upwards and making my own destiny. And I guess you only do that by taking leaps of faith.

Risks sometimes don’t pay off. That’s why they are risks.

‘To expose to a chance of loss or damage; hazard’

Here’s one example: The first ‘proper’ job out of Uni that I took didn’t work out. I naively accepted it while I was still at Uni thinking I was clever not to have to worry about months of job hunting. In hindsight I didn’t give myself the time to appraise whether it was the right thing to do. I had a week time difference from finishing Uni to starting work. Within months of starting I was desperately unhappy and found myself questioning what it was I wanted to do, where I wanted to go and how I was going to get there. I’d studied a Marketing degree for 4 years at University which lent itself to the job I was in, within the Marketing team of a large retailer, where I was told that jobs didn’t exist to do with social media. I disagreed. When 4 months later I had quit, I wondered if what I’d studied for my degree was completely useless. Of course it wasn’t but at the time I thought differently.

Licking my wounds I moved to London without a job, just before the economy imploded.  Everyone asked me what I was smoking. My parents said I needed to stick at it. But I knew it wasn’t right. It didn’t *feel* right. So I trusted my instinct and took a risk. To thrust myself in to uncertainty in the country’s capital. Even though the job didn’t work out, the life lessons it taught me were invaluable and accelerated my thought processes to get me to where I am now, I firmly believe that.

After a short and highly enjoyable stint at Splendid, working with some inspirational people, I joined the fold at Consolidated PR where I’ve been involved with some brilliant projects, which Paul mentions here in the inaugural company blog post over at Thatsgreatand.com

I’ll paraphrase the post:

In the last twelve months we’ve set up our digital and social media stall here in the Covent Garden office, commenced an agency-wide social media education and training programme and started integrating social media activity into project and retained campaigns for clients in both London and Edinburgh.  In this short space of time we’ve delivered digital and social media work for a whole range of brands and organisations – MTV, several parts of the Scottish Government, The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, learndirect and Mishcon de Reya just to name a few.  On top of that we’ve got lots more exciting work on the boil with a number of other clients, and an appetite for more in 2010.

So as is evident, in a year we’ve made great progress.

However, I’ve always held a great curiosity and interest in adland. Paul gave me stick for having a subscription to Campaign magazine. But I always felt at some point I’d move in to it. Don’t ask me why, it was just one of those fate type things I felt would happen. Which leads me wonderfully to my next leap of faith. Dare, the digital agency of the decade.

I’m excited about the new challenge, settling in to the role of Social Media Planner and mixing it up with the web trendies.

Let’s hope it’s an upwards leap on the career trapeze. Wish me luck!

I’ve been moving house and currently don’t have any internet for another few weeks. How have I survived you may ask? Well, apart from keeping the blog up to date, I’ve not really missed it. Strange of me to say as you’re meant to miss something when it’s gone no? A bit of downtime effectively made me reappraise how I spend my time outside of work. Previously, I would get home and be spending time on posts, current or future drafts, sometimes until the very early hours of the morning. It wasn’t a chore though, I enjoyed it.

Now, I’ve moved in to a new place with some work / university friends and I guess you could say without the internet at home, I’m taking my life back a bit and being physically social instead of just talking about all things social media online.  It was all too easy to become totally immersed in the all encompassing world of the interweb, it never stops. The thousands of unread items in my Google Reader are testament to that.  When we get the all in one package from Virgin Media installed soon, this is going to be a bit of a late new years resolution for me:  Let’s try not be so reliant on spending as much time glued to the computer screen.

It’s been more hassle than it should be ISP wise and it’s not even been installed yet! Doesn’t fill me with much faith for how well the service will perform over the year.

Normal service will be resuming mid June and thanks for sticking around.

Best,
Mike.

I’ve spent the last few days making the migration over from the mobile Vox platform to WordPress. Now, here we are with a completely fresh design and it’s added that lick of paint that I believe was needed. As much as I liked mobile blogging with Vox it just wasn’t all that user friendly and easy to manage.

What do you think to the new look?

M.