I think I stayed true to the emphasis on High Street fashion and it did not change following the opening of the site as it was something quite specific that I wished to look at.

I tried to interact with my community in a number of ways. Firstly, I included a lot of hyperlinks in my blog. I thought as it was a fashion website it was really important that readers could instantly look at and buy the products I was talking about. I also made my blog very SEO friendly by ensuring all posts were categorised and heavily tagged with every shop, person, product, material and look that was mentioned in the post, and as a result the majority of my hits came from search engine referral. In the site I tired to add extra content in the form of polls and embedded videos made the shops featured on my blog in order to keep visitors engaged in other ways. By putting this in the side bar of my blog it also fleshed out the appearance of my blog.

In terms of social media, originally I decided to set up a separate Twitter account for my blog, and began following other blogs and people related to what I was writing about. However I found that the amount of followers I was getting back meant that the exercise proved a little pointless, so I embeded my own Twitter stream on the site. As the blog got more established, perhaps I could have reviewed this as it was getting a lot more hits than when I first began.  I promoted all my posts through Facebook and Twitter and obviously used bit.ly to share the links.

I began drawing more traffic to the site once I began interacting with more blogs in the online men’s fashion community. I managed to get myself put on a few blogrolls linking back to my site and have achieved a fair few hits this way. I did begin commenting on article on certain blogs with a link back to my own site, but I often found my comments deleted as it was against the site’s rules to include hyperlinks in comments.

The busiest day on my site was when I received 109 hits for a post that I wrote about men’s harem pants in relation to The X Factor, and this also proved to be my most popular all time post. I think this was because looking at the search engine terms, people were searching for specific items of clothes that the contestants wore on the show. I think it was a successful post because it was timely, capitalising on a phenomenon and answering questions that people were likely to ask. Overall I’ve achieved over 2000 hits in just over three months which I am really pleased with.

However I did become concerned that there was perhaps not enough original content on the site which why I decided to do a feature on vintage fashion in Cardiff which included interviews with sellers, vox pops with shoppers and original photographs. Which vintage fashion was not necessarily within my target audience, I angled it to my readers by showing how looks could be replicated on the High Street.

I was also far too ambitious with the amount of posts I intended to make each week. I originally aimed to post two to three times a week but soon realised that this was quite an unrealistic target due to the heavy reliance on images that my site has. I takes a long time to research the clothes other pictures and then upload them all onto the dashboard, then add suitable captions and hyperlinks. As a result I posted a lot less frequently than I anticipated, especially during the Christmas break and assessment period.

With this in mind perhaps if I was to do the assessment again, I would probably set up an X Factor blog, as I actually intended to at the start. It would have taken less sourcing and the show’s format would have meant I would have been forced to blog at least one a week. I decided not to do this as I thought there would not be enough to write about after the show finished its run on television but with all the speculation about the American series, the show is never out of the tabloids, so it would have still been quite easy to keep writing about. However, I have enjoyed writing my blog as it has allowed me to discover a new interest as I had never considered writing about men’s fashion before, so I am grateful that my blog has given me the opportunity to explore this.

Blogs for assessment:

Vintage in Cardiff and on the High Street

X Factor Style Crimes

Online Journalism Post

Cardiff’s nightlife could be compared to a boxing match – it’s a battle of the national heavyweights vs the local featherweights. In the red corner Team Oceana-Walkabout-Tiger Tiger-Revolution. And in the blue corner Team Clwb-Buffalo-Metros-10 Ft Tall. Is this town big enough for the both of them, or will one soon find themselves knocked out?

With Christmas just around the corner, clubs in Cardiff can be rest assured of a busy period. As they prepare for the New Year lull in business to set in, promoters will be looking forward to the return of Cardiff’s student population to ensure they are packed to the rafters once more.

However, should clubbers’ New Year’s resolution be to change their clubbing habits and support the independent scene?

Last orders - the now defunct Barfly

This year saw the downfall of one of Cardiff’s most prolific live music venues and clubs, Barfly, which closed its doors for the final time over the summer. It was a blow to music fans and the city’s alternative scene.

Glam, home to indie night 'Propaganda'

Meanwhile the commercial clubs continued to flourish, proving ever popular with their winning formula of cheap drinks and chart friendly music. Glam spotted the opportunity to capitalise on their opposition’s downfall and lured indie loving fans in with the launch of the nationally successful ‘Propaganda’ chain.

However this is not something Swn Festival organiser and Cwb Ifor Bach promoter John Rostron is worried about, seeing it as a new way for the independent scene to reinvent itself:

“If the ‘alternative’ is reaching out to the commercial clubs then that can only be a good thing. It means the alternative scene is making an impact, and as it becomes more populist, the alternative scene will find new interesting ideas to fill the gaps and start over.”

However, he does recognise the threat that commercial clubs pose to the development of the independent scene:

“I think the commercial scene can stifle a city over the weekend. It’s important that a healthy underground is allowed to flourish and isn’t choked by major commercial operations.”

Cardiff clubbers have their say on the city’s nightlife

The ill fated Club NME lasted a month before closing

Someone who knows exactly what that is like is Ed Bovingdon, an independent promoter who launched the ill-fated Club NME at Buffalo Bar at the end of 2009. He blames people’s unwillingness to try something different for its failure:

“People don’t want to risk having an awful night so just rely on commercial clubs for an average night, plus they can offer cheaper drinks. Most people don’t care that the actual entertainment is the same every week, even indie kids stick to what they know,” he explains.

Ed also blames the commercials, but doesn’t really think there is much they can do:

“The fact that some clubs are so big and famous does mean they overshadow little ones. I don’t think they directly attempt to crush independent nights but there is definitely a knock-on effect.”

Local DJ Tom Bentley has played various venues across the city

One independent club that is definitely not struggling is Clwb Ifor Bach, or Welsh Club as it is affectionately known to its revellers. As Cardiff’s premier independent night club, it has been at the forefront of live music in the city since 1983.

Its club nights are also hugely popular, with its nights on Wednesdays and Saturdays attracting massive crowds, with queues often leading halfway down Wombany Street. This is something which local DJ Tom Bentley credits to the club’s strong sense of knowing what its punters want:

“I think venues like Clwb have to retain their identity in order to facilitate the crowd they rely to go to them. As a DJ you should always read the crowd. Playing a standard set every time never works.”

Independent bars are also now dabbling with the club scene with places such as Cardiff Arts Institute putting on clubnights which showcase experimental dubstep and electro. Perhaps these bar-clubs are another way to secure a bright future for the independents and beat their commercial rivals?

A new breed of club? Cardiff Arts Institute

Not necessarily says Tom Bentley:

“Commercial nights will always exist. Not everyone wants to listen to new sounds or is into dubstep.” In fact, some club goers are also put off by the trendy, music loving crowd that indie clubs attract.There is always room for both – just as long as each respects each other.  Music unites us all.”

This is something that John whole heartedly agrees with.

“Competition can be really good for a scene and a city – having things to kick against and to help you up your game. There’s definitely room for both.”

So while it would seem that the two scenes are fully opposed and there are instances where the commercials can crush the independents, it looks as if there is just as much of a battle with their contemporaries. The perceived battle between commercials and independents is perhaps just that.

Where to find your independent clubnights in Cardiff

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AS an artsy type, I am more than a little scared of numbers. The mere meory of double maths at school makes me shudder to my very bones. Being a trainee journalist, I thought I’d kissed those days of triganometory and pythagarous theory goodbye. While that is true to an extent, it is with trepidation that I entered the world of data journalism.

Data in journalism is all around us. School league tables and GCSE results are something we are always used to seeing in the papers and the MPs expenses scandal was broken by a highly talented team using computer assisted reporting. And there are no many stories that I am sure are yet to be uncovered. But as a magazine journalist who’s interested in showbiz and entertainment, I’d unsure as to how I will end up using it. Unless I somehow end up analysisng Lady GaGa’s rider or Jonathan Ross’s salary, which probably would take a lot of figure manipulation.

However, for now I’m remaining open-minded, but the prospect of spending any time of my journalistic career tapping formulas into Excel, doing maths that I couldn’t even do in school, is one that gives me chills as the uninterested son of an accountant.

Journalism is often about journalists having the story, rather than if the audience actually want the story. It is with this in mind we need to refocus on our audience, and talk about them as the community formally known as the audience.

This was advice given to CJS students by The Times‘ Community and Web Development Editor, Joanna Geary. She spoke of how while the barriers for talking and sharing have collapsed, it has not turned out as realistically as first hoped. We now have to think about how we can talk to readers directly. This is why Joanna took the decisive step to personally email the top 500 commentors on the Times website to ask for feedback and suggestions.

I think that newspapers have to try a lot harder to engage with their readers. I, perhaps somewhat biasedly, think that the magazine industry do this a lot more successfully. While newspapers are struggling with ways of putting their content online and working about a business model that will made this financially viable, magazines are just getting on with it.

Two of the best websites out there I believe are Heat‘s heatworld.com and Grazia‘s graziadaily.co.uk. Both of the sites do not give away their respective magazines content, but focus on daily stories that interest their readership. They interact with them through the use of polls, diarys and blogs from some of the writers, and Grazia even has its own vodcast with Grazia TV. They make their websites a destination for their already established community, without compromising their magazine content. In fact, many articles will push for the reader to go out and buy the magazine to find out more about certain things. In this way, there is a symbiosis between the dependency for print and online.

We currently believe that this is a rapidly changing time in journalism, which indeed it is. But this is nothing new according to BBC Technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones.

The past 30 years have seen huge changes in the realm of television news. Speaking to us as part of the Online module at CJS, Rory told of how the current changes just fit into a wider history of change in journalism.

He began by showing a video of the beginnings of breakfast television. It showed a reporter in a studio reading the news with just a slideshow of pictures. Quite frankly it was boring and it’s no wonder that viewers initially deserted the programme.

In this digital age we can now be engaged with news in so many different ways – sweeping graphics and presentation hold our attention and tell us the story in lay mans terms, video brings the story to life, and user-generated content adds that element of realism. This is before we even mention such things as websites, Twitter and blogs, all of which allow us to engage with news outside of its traditional broadcast limitations.

But instead of ramming home the usual ‘this is such an exciting time etc’ spiel to us, Rory leveled with us, admitting some flaws in the changes we are currently seeing. He admitted that Facebook was actually a bad place for journalism to flourish due to its small audiences – something which I am sure Claire Wardle would have something to say about. Talking about Twitter, Rory admitted it’s not changing the world of journalism in quite the way it was anticipated;

“All Twitter is doing is bouncing back news sources,” he said. “It is a great news agency, but we used to have this starry-eyed view of the impact it would have.”

This was a refreshing statement. To suddenly have all of these things thrust into your lap can be a daunting prospect as a trainee journalist, but to have a respected BBC correspondent admit that journalists themselves are struggling to define what things are, comes somewhat as a relief.

“The question of what blogging actually is, is still up in the air.”

I breathed a huge sigh of relief at this point. While I have been blogging for over 18 months now, I still often find myself wondering what exactly I am supposed to be doing. I am sure if you look through this blog’s history you will find that out for yourself. Is it supposed to be a news site? Is it supposed to offer opinion? Can you just rant about things that annoy you?

I think what Rory managed to reassure us it that while things are shifting in journalism yet again, it’s ok to not understand completely where it is going to end up. Change in journalism is nothing new; journalists have been adapting thier storytelling techniques around new technology for years. While technology will come and go, the ehos of good journalism and finding new ways to interact with your audience, will always remain at the heart.

“Journalism is a business”

That’s a statement that is becoming increasingly worrying to an industry that is trying desperately to fund itself in the changing online landscape. Advertising is simple not bringing enough money to publications, but can we expect people to pay for content that is free elsewhere?

The Times were the first to introduce the controversial idea of the pay wall and since only the News of the World have followed suit. However, what Adam pointed out  is that unless what is being written is truly unique, people will not pay for it; they can get it elsewhere. Readers can always fall back on the BBC news site will always remain free, given that part of our licence fee is used to fund it.

However, I personally believe people would pay for online magazines. News is available anywhere and everywhere, and you can be pretty sure that most titles will always cover the story you want to read. But the content of specific magazines are unique to the title, and with iPad and iPhones changing the journalism landscape, I can see more and more people paying for apps to read their favourite titles.

Adam Tinworth

RBI have introduced an interesting payment model, charging not for information that people want, but for information people NEED.  On their websites they do not charge for their journalism, but they charge for their data, which is what their readers are most interested in.

This shows how pay walls can be used effectively, and it has worked for RBI who make most of their money this way. However, it only really works in the context of B2B publishing. As far as the future of paying for regular news online is concerned, the perfect business model for online journalism is yet to be discovered.

Adam also talked about creating the perfect blog. We’ve all heard about the hyperlocal blogs, that focus on a very specific beat or ward, but what about the hyperniche?

Specialising in a specific area of journalism provides the chance to build up a new community who are getting content they are unable to get elsewhere. Adam picked out Flight Blogger, part of RBI’s Flight Global magazine, which began its life as a small blog written by a normal guy who had no journalism experience but a passion for aviation. The success and popularity of his blog had led him into a full-time job with Flight Global. The result of the Flight Blogger’s success somewhat contradicted Adam’s statement to us that “Journalism is not an art”, showing that one man’s passion and creativity can lead to exciting places.

That got your attention didn’t it? Sorry to let you down, but this blog post is not going to feature any of the above, it’s just a cheeky way of bumping myself up the Google search results – something that is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

This week in Online and Mobile Journalism, Glyn Mottershead explained the dos and don’ts of writing for the internet.”Write for the reader, plan for the machine,” he proclaimed. And thus we learnt that pitching your journalism online is an entirely different ball game.

First off, headlines. I love a good tabloid headline, most often they are what draws me into a print article. However, what for example, does “Super Cally Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious” tell us about the article that would follow? Absolutely nothing, as far as the internet is concerned.

Therefore headlines on the internet must include key words that someone would type into Google if they were looking for information on the subject. Further to this, they all need to be written in less than 60 characters if Google is to display them properly. It’s not exactly going to lead to the most thrilling of headlines, but it’s something we are going to have to get used to if we want to use the web to its full potential.

But what about keeping the reader’s attention once we have it?

Readers have a limited cognitive load. They read up to 25% slower on the web than in print and studies show they also read in an F shape, so the most important information at the top should be the most important. However, there are a few tricks to keep them hanging around a little bit longer.

• Bullet points – making the text less daunting for the reader, as well as bringing conciseness to your writing.
• A subheading splits the text into easily identifiable parts.
• Key words or names highlighted in bold to make them stand out.
• Keep things simple, with no waffle, as I’ve clearly demonstrated here. *cough*
• Think about images and pictures for more visual stimulation.
• Add hyperlinks to refer your readers to other places – you never know, they may return the  favour and thus up your hit count.

I came away thinking the lecture thinking that everything I have ever done blog-wise before has probably been wrong, but I now realise that a search engine is exactly like a magazine shelf, whereby we want our product in the prime spot so that consumers will pick it up.It is just about adapting our writing to a different platform. While it may dampen our creativity slightly, as Charlie Brooker suggests, it is important to find a balance between entertaining our audience and ensuring our work gets found in the first place.

So putting all this into good practice, I diligently set up my niche blog, HIGHMAN Fashion, with all of  these new found tips and tricks in mind. I began seeing if my blog would appear in a search engine. The title brought back nothing. The title and the article headline didn’t either. The title, article headline and several keywords didn’t throw anything up. The title, article headline, keywords and a whopping paragraph of my article still stumped up nothing. So I have decided, Google must just hate me.

Meadows began his career by offering a free photo service, practicing his trade on everyday people, travelling around on a big red bus, a project which he called the Free Photographic Omnibus, and in 2001 he became creative director of the BBC’s digital storytelling project, ‘Capture Wales’.

You may be asking what a ‘digital story’ is. Well, essentially a video of around three minutes in length that contains nothing but still images of specially chosen photographs and an audio commentary. It’s simple, but has the power to make its reader feel a range of emotions. You only need to take a look at Abigail’s moving story of losing her mother, which reduced the majority of my peers to gibbering wrecks, to see what I am talking about.

Daniel Meadows

As someone who is used to consuming journalism that is all singing, all dancing, it just shows that sometimes simplicity is key. All that is required at create these stories is photographs and a microphone, meaning anyone can tell their story.

However, as emotive and heartwarming some of the stories than Daniel showed us were, I couldn’t help but be confused about if it’s simplicity was actually a backwards step in a rapidly changing world were new technology is key. While the citizen has become the journalist, we as trainee journos, are constantly told of exciting new tools, technologies and gadgets that can take our journalism to a whole new level and I’m not sure if these embrace these developments. New technology means we are just able to distribute them more easily.

I left the lecture knowing that there was definitely a place for these stories in journalism – they reminded me of the three minute programmes that often follow the Channel 4 News. However, I also left feeling unsure of exactly how they could fit into the sorts of journalism I am interested in. I think what I’ve spent the last 300-odd words trying to say is that I am not completely turned on by the idea of digital storytelling. This comes from someone who loves a good level of production (I am an X Factor fan after all, which is evidence enough) and while I can understand why some people are charmed by it, I think the age old proverb, each to their own, is particularly pertinent.

Dame Cheryl Cole jumped out from behind the judges desk for a second time to perform new single, ‘Promise This’, last night. And while we were all chanting “Aloutette ette ette” deep into our slumbers, we were left pondering yet again, did she mime?

T’was a poisoned chalice for our Chez, who on her last outing on the X Factor stage, received criticism for the apparent lack of live vocals, when she debuted ‘Fight For This Love’ on the show, this time last year.

Her performance of ‘Promise This’ was her stage comeback since coming down with a near deadly bout of malaria a mere 12 weeks ago. Armed with that fighting spirit she has become famous for, Cheryl emerged from behind them doors with a point to prove.

The routine was jaw droppingly energetic – Louis got a cheeky glimpse of La Cole’s derriere, (anyone thinking he is a dirty old perv is definitely barking up the wrong tree). The outfit was suitably skimpy – which was an experience that was slightly ruined by watching with an octogenarian who repeatedly proclaimed “Oh I wish she’d put some clothes on”.  And as for the vocals? Well, erm, no one is entirely sure.

Cheryl claimed in an interview just days ago, that last night’s performance was going to be “100% live”, but history began to repeat itself when the words ‘Cheryl Cole’ and ‘mime’ began trending on Twitter. Oh dear.

Thus follow the various conflicting reports from ‘sources’. Some say Cheryl was singing live, others say it was half and half, while some claim the routine was so energetic it would be impossible to sing – an excuse I’ve no time for – GaGa does it.

The official party line, which comes from Cheryl’s PR agency, Supersonic, is that the performance was pre-recorded an hour before the show aired but all the vocals were live, except for certain parts on the chorus, which were not mimed as Cheryl did not have the microphone to her mouth. All sounds very technical.

I’m going to stick my neck on the block here – I don’t give believe ALL the vocals were live, and in places it seemed as if Cheryl had become the latest victim of the highly contagious, X Factor auto tune disease, which we all thought we’d seen the back of after Gay-and-Straight-gate. But, being a slightly biased soul, I couldn’t really give a toots hoot if she’s miming to blooming Britney. As long as she’s breathing, and possibly gyrating, I, along with the best of the British male population, am a very happy man. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Jan Moir.

Swn celebrates new and upcoming music and has helped bands such as The Drums, Pulled Apart By Horses and Chipmunk gain further exposure. It also gves Welsh bands the chance to showcase some of their music on a larger platform.

The festival is the brainchild of BBC Radio 1′s honourary Cardiffrian, Huw Stephens and Cardiff gig promoter, John Rostron, who set up Swn back in 2007. It can be compared to Bristol, Nottingham and Manchester’s Dot to Dot festivals, whereby gigs take place simultaneously across the city at many different venues.

Now in it’s fourth year, the line up is stronger than ever, with sets from Kids in Glass Houses, Egyptian Hip Hop, who were recently named by NME as one of the ten band you must see live, as well as a DJ set from new music legend Steve Lamaq. A full list of all the bands playing can be found here.

The map below shows you all of the gig venues for 2010′s Swn Festival.