Welcome to August friends, and like me I’m sure you’re also overheating whilst frantically typing away to communicate through emails, sms, blogs, twitter, intranet, all other social networks….need I go on……but there’s one more hot little site to add to the list for our world of work.

Cast your eye over the handsome new www.my-ijob.com  For how long have we been producing videos to enable employers to express their people brand through engaging video and audio? Yes, a while. Well this new video job site could just be the ticket. It’s early days, but awaiting their partnership with AOL’s 32million monthly users in Sept could be the i-cing (sorry!) on the cake for all the hours of filming and editing that ended up on the cutting room floor.

An aquatic, flightless bird, the Emperor penguin is the largest of the 17 species.
With its large head, short neck and elongated body the Emperor grows to an almighty 3.7ft.

And thanks to Iceland Foods Ltd, the fluffy grey fellow on the right is supporting their charity efforts for Alder Hey Children’s Hospital.

Thank you
x

This weekend I joined 100,000 music lovers (mainly fellow northerners) at Lancashire Cricket Ground, with the very rare pleasure of ‘freak’ Manchester summer weather – yes, dry and sunny.

The gig provided a full 8 hour set of seamless music entertainment. Headlining were the talented Sheffield fourseome, The Arctic Monkeys. Known for their energetic indie-rock/post punk music with flavoursome lyrics, they played a jaw dropping, uninterrupted 90 minutes from their early album ‘whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not” (fastest-selling debut album in UK chart history) and more recently ‘favourite worst nightmare’. The best track by far on the day was ‘i bet you look good on the dancefloor’. See ‘Videos’ on their site.

Equally as enjoyable were supporting acts Amy Winehouse (amazing Rehab and Back to Black), The Coral (Dreaming of you and In the Morning), plus new material from SuperGrass (Pumping on your stereo).

Well done boys, a great set. Enjoy the dates in Australia.

Equally as impressive is the story of the Monkeys rise to success on the web. Not down to a shrewd marketing campaign by a record company. Legend says it was thanks to the power of the internet that an army of fans latched onto free downloads of demo recordings on the web. The Monkeys are quick to point out that they did not put the songs online themselves. They started gigging at small venues in 2003 and handed out demo CDs to the crowd, who in turn put them on the internet for others to hear.

For those intrigued by the album title ‘whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not’, read this for true Northern grit:

‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’ is a line from the book (by Alan Sillitoe) and later film (by Karel Reisz and starring Albert Finney) Saturday Night And Sunday Morning. One of the key texts in the British ‘angry young man’ tradition, it tells the story of the charismatic but amoral Arthur Seaton, who works in a factory by day and wreaks havoc shagging his colleague’s wife by night. After being busted and beaten to near-death by squaddies, he delivers a bitter soliloquy: “If any knowing bastard says that’s me I’ll tell them I’m a dynamite dealer waiting to blow the factory to kingdom come. I’m me and nobody else. Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not. They don’t know a bloody thing about me.”

Alex (bassist) saw the movie: “I thought to myself, ‘That’s a right line, I’m gonna put that in summat.’

For those interested (or confused :-)) by any Sheffield dialect and slang, there’s even a book available Amazon: Sheffieldish (A beginners phrase book).