As much as I would love to I don’t have the time to grow food, I’m sure it is very satisfying to grow your own food and to know where it has come from I’m just not sure how feasible the idea is for a student but for a family I think it is a very good idea to not only grow your own food but to also educate children. As pointed out in the article children have become shockingly bad at being able to identify fruit and vegetables when presented with them with shocking suggestions when asked what it is.

A suggestion is to go foraging for food, does automatically make me think of caveman times and in summer will probably be a lot of fun, the cold winters and not so attractive though. They are almost as attractive as the thought of rummaging through skips for food, which is another suggestion.

I think this is all a great idea if you have the time and you feel passionately about helping the environment and don’t mind putting in the effort. I may consider growing my own food when I’m a bit older, have a permanent address and actually own some gardening tools!

There was a recent clothing swap party in Wolverhampton where a group of people met up and swapped clothes. The guidelines they have are:

1. The clothes should be new, nearly new (worn only once or twice) or gently used (worn, but still in very good condition);
2. Clean (freshly laundered and pressed);
3. You can bring: coats, dresses, skirts, suits, trousers, jeans, tops, blouses, sweaters, tee-shirts, work-out wear, costumes, shoes, purses, jewellery, belts, hats, watches;
4. Bring as many items as you want and take as many as you like!
5. DO NOT bring dirty or damaged clothes;
6. Unclaimed items should be donated to various charity shops in the area

Is this your floor?

Marilyn Shoes

These shows are the latest trend to hit the eco-market, Marilyn Shoes. The 4 inch shoes is made from vegetable tanned, non-toxic leathers with claims of being the comfiest heel out there with a lightweight and flexible design to give you the ultimate walking experience without the usual pain associated with the heel! You can get the platforms in either black and white as shown above or coral and beige for £120.

The shows certainly have an acquired taste about them but the idea has good intentions. Let’s hope Topshop jump on this bandwagon so we can all be eco-friendly fashion wearers. What do you think? Would you wear these shoes? Complete the poll below.

4am Project

In this weeks lecture we had guest lecturer Karen Strunks tell us about the 4am project which she founded and how she has worked her way up to become known around the world.

Karen runs the 4am project which is what can be described as capturing a global view of the world at 4am. An idea which started out very small has now become very popular with around 4500 images submitted since 2009 from 40 different countried- an impressive statistic seeing as Karen runs the project single handedly!

Karen uses Flickr to get her photos on the net and allow people to view but does require a fee for any images that people wish to use. She uses photoshop and paintshop pro for her photos.

To take part in the 4am project all you need is a camera and to stay awake untill 4am when you can then get snap happy! It’s very easy to get involved and upload your photos just visit the website which will explain the necessary steps. Events such as the elections have been photographed to Birmingham at night. Check our Karens blog as well which she reguarly updates on the latest happenings of her photography work and the 4am project.

He described 2 steps:

Step 1: Check your presence: – For the name you would like to use

- namechk.com

- It’s important to have a unique name

- Brand yourself

Step 2: Be transparent: – Blog the back story

- publish your roughbook- so basically all the notes you make to get to the final product

Graham then gave us 10 very  helpful tools which would help us to manage the different tools available to make the above steps easier and more achievable.

1. publish2.com- a social bookmarking site where Twitter and Delicious can be managed. It was here that we were also shown a video of the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger who gave 3 tips on being in the online world:                                                                                                                                                                1) Have a good pool of knowledge in your area as this will get you places- its also a great marketing tool if you know your stuff!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                2) Reach a lot of people- achieve this by using good marketing tools and using your journalist initiative- basically get yourself out there and to as many people as possible.                                                                                                                                                                         3) Give information for free- it’s the only way your work is going to get out there and your name. You have to start from the bottom to get to higher places.
2. pixelpipe.com- allows you to have a number of networks who could all potentially link back to you and your story generating traffic to you and your sites
3. hellotext.com
4. tubemogul.com- a platform for using video
5. bit.ly- a URL shortener an dcan track clicks so you can see how many and where they are coming from
6. RSS and Yahoo pipes and Feedburner- allows you to customise the RSS feed and sort through and filter through a lot of data with ease
7. Specialist search engines
8. tweetdeck.com- a great platform to monitor in general and to search key words which would be of interest to you
9. pingomatic.com- sends a ping to search engines to notify of when your blog has been updated
10. netvibes.com- allows you to put all your feeds into one place

The advantages give by Graham of using the internet were:

• It’s free and reliable
• A great way to get involved in a lot of things very quickly and easily
• A good way to entertain people
• Engage and encourage conversation
• There are a lot of service out there- use them

The lecture was really interesting and gave a lot of advice of handling the online world which can be a scary place sometimes. There are so many ways to connect with people and distribute your opinions and ideas and there is a way to suit everyones preferences.

The main points made by Sarah were:

• To keep it short to avoid losing interest
• Make it interesting- subjects people are genuinely going to be interested in
• Film as much as possible- always better to have too much than not enough
• Make sure you have the right lighting- you can have the best shots but if we can’t see the person then it’s useless

Sarah showed us some very interesting videos which highlighted how not to do a video for online publication, the main reasons why the videos were not any good was because they didn’t follow the above guidelines. A very good point made was don’t just film people for the sake of it, film people who have something interesting to say and have a relevant link to the story who will hopefully have some enthusiasm when they are speaking as well.

We learnt about the 4 types of online video, which are:

• Moving pictures
• Video diary
• Edited narrative
• TV show

A good example of video we were shown was of the Charlie Brooker video which you can find on YouTube, “How to report the news”. It was a very humorous way to show how a video news report should be conducted. It’s definitely worth a watch as it’s funny but interesting at the same time! We also saw a video which was loads of Twitter updates mingled together to make a really fascinating video…again definitely worth a watch!

The day started with a very quick entry into the NEC with our own name tags!

Press pass badge

We then started to have a wonder round looking at the different stands. There was many different stands from greener travel to a demonstration on a good sealant to keep the water out of pipes. There were many demonstrations from the friendly people at their stands who were very eager and enthusiastic to share there product or service.

Demonstration on sealing water out

This guy who I was told was spending the 3 days in this tunnel giving demonstrations is showing how water leakages can be stopped with the use of a rubber band which is fitted around the gap which stop the water straight away. We even had the chance to have a go ourselves but my summer dress was not so willing!

The day was very informative and opened my eyes to a lot of new stuff which is available to help make businesses more sustainable and become environmentally green. My day was also made a lot more interesting by all the freebies that were thrown my way, from stress balls shaped like vans to the many pens…that do actually work!

If you like the sound of this then do not fear you have not missed out as it is on again next year, 24th – 26th May 2011 at the NEC. Definitely worth a visit if you are interested in becoming a sustainable business and want then best advice, and it’s free so there is no excuse!