Measurement and efficiency were some of the themes for 2009, and I’m sure they will be for 2010. Through Homecamp I learnt about monitoring home power use, and with Redcatco we got even better at measuring things and making business cases.

In 2009 I experienced my first ever SXSWi, which meant heading to Austin, Texas, with Chinwag and the Digital Mission crew to meet with lots of new and familiar faces from the digital industry.

And I got to see a few bands while I was out there too, including The Webb sisters, for the second time in the year!

A fair amount of the year was taken up with psychology study – reading, experiments, write ups and an exam. Probably the highlight of all of that was attending the CAPP conference, hearing some very well grounded, but inspiring lectures, case studies and talks. I ended the year with a First in cognitive psychology, so it feels like the hard word paid off.

The summer was an eventful one. Although a lot happened in the spring, Redcatco social media work started to build up over the summer, and I seemed to be speaking and doing social reporting at more and more events. I even bumped into this chap…

There was still time for fun side projects, one of the most memorable was the Twitter Cook Off, watching a chef judge a set of sandwiches via Twitter, as you do, and listening to Caalie relay the results to Nicky and Maggie Philbin.

I was involved in quite a few NESTA
related events over the year, and also a couple of Reuters ones. The meant that I got to work with some bright, fun people, and chase political leaders around London. A very different perspective from the Cabinet Office events I helped with earlier in the year. This was also the year of the Digital Britain report.

The 1pound40 event at Reuters was one of the highlights of the year, although presenting at SMiB09, Online Information 09 and the Dell B2B Huddle was close to top of the list too.

The number of meet ups seemed to grow over the year, and I added to the mix by kicking off the Thames Valley Social Media Cafe, inspired by the model Lloyd Davis pioneered in The Tuttle Club. One of the evening highlights was the Cozytweetup that ended up with a candle lit picnic in St. James Park, before everyone was moved on, in a very friendly manner, by the police.

During the summer our eldest son managed to break his arm not once, but twice. Oh, and he burnt the other arm just for good measure!

VannFest was, as the previous year, the highlight of the summer. And for the record, I didn’t get a tatoo… Although did this photo of me ever cause a saga! I’m assuming it was the QR code on the T shirt .

VannFest wouldn’t be VannFest without a picture of some sky candles…

There were quite a few business trips during the year. Too many to mention, although the visit to Bonn, Germany sticks out in my memory. Amazing place:

Very oddly I appeared in a Vodafone advert in Germany, both on-line and in posters. You’ll have to look closely, but you’ll see me on the screen of the phone, next to Robert Scoble (remember what I said about those faces at that dinner!)

Over the course of the year my photography set up evolved, with some new cameras and lenses. I started to shoot some video – having been won over by the Canon 5D Mark II.

I squeezed in a photo walk or two, including a memorable afternoon with friend and Flickr super star photocillin.

And Canon let me try out some amazing gear, at just the right moments during the year, including the largest lens I’ve ever handled. The photo doesn’t do it justice – that’s a full size camera body on the lens in the picture there. It takes two hands to lift and gets comments everywhere – including during the Legoland fireworks, where more than one young lad said “I want one of those!”. Needless to say, it captures some amazing images.

Seeing real-time Time-Slice photography in action at the Canon Pro Solutions Exhibition was a definite peak camera-geek moment.

The expanding photography set up meant the chance to shoot some memorable pictures at various places around the planet, as well as Sara’s amazing body painting art.

I read lots of books, not just psychology ones, including reviewing quite a few, and featuring in some too.

Oh, and printed one of my own…

Back at home, the apple and pear trees and the vines were fruitful, the kids grew up some more and the recording studio remained sadly unused – something I hope to fix in 2010.

In the autumn I got to watch two of my favourite bassists play, at the same time! Michael Manring and Steve Lawson played together in London:

And I even managed to edit together this video for the bass guitar blog:

That wasn’t the only music in the year. Later in the autumn I went up to Birmingham and photographed and interviewed behind the scenes at the UB40 Live Loud and Local gig:

In November Kate showed quite how much interest a fox on the underground can create! By then I’d also set up SocialOptic with Jim, something which will be very much at the centre of 2010. With November on the scene, I dived in and took part in Movember – growing a moustache to raise awareness of men’s health issues, including prostate cancer. It opened my eyes to a few things I will write a lot more about in 2010.

To round out the year, snow arrived. Followed by more snow, and lots of it! The roads were chaos, so I holed up in the home office and click-clacked away to close of projects, ready for a clean start to 2010.

As the snow subsided, visitors arrived, and finally the family managed to squeeze in a break down to the west country.

Including a morning on the beach in Devon, before heading home for the New Year…

I’ve raved about the PowerShot S90 before – it’s a very high quality and very small camera in a very competitive market space these days. I purchased the SX200is for times when I go without a Digital SLR, like these shots at the movember party. The S90 is a notch above the Sx200is, in terms of both price and features, but it turns out it isn’t a straight forward comparison. Firstly, playing with the camera in the darkest corners of LEON, here is a mix of shots taken with my 5D Mark II and the S90:

Some shots from Canon Tuttle (on the S90 and the 5D Mark II of course)

It lived up to my expectations. Remember, the shots there are a mixture of the S90 and a big DSLR that is almost ten times the price. Yes, you can tell the difference, and no, I’m not trying to compare them (click through on a photo and look at the additional information on the right hand side of the Flickr page to see which camera took which) – Just saying that you can use the two together or substitute when needs must – it isn’t always easy to carry the 5D Mark II around all evening during a party.

The S90 is quite a bit more compact that the SX200is, and better in low light. It goes up to 3200ISO compared to the SX200is’s 1600, and the aperture range is f/2-f/4.9  versus f/3.4-5.3 – remember, small is good . Combined, that’s a quite a bit of extra range in the dark. What I’d loose in going to the S90 is the hyper-zoom capability  - the SX200is has a lens that is equivalent to 28mm-336mm, while the S90 reaches to 105mm. A 105mm zoom is none too shabby, and is more that enough for most photography. However, 336mm is an insanely long zoom, and one of the things that attracted me to the SX200is – I can’t travel with a zoom lens that large for my DSLRs, but the SX200is fits in my pocket. I can’t say I’ve used that level of zoom very often, but it does come in handy.

The S90 fixes one of my minor niggles with the Sx200is – it has a motorised flash that only comes up when it is needed. Only a cosmetic thing, but a nice touch. The s90 also has an extra dial around the lens, which is configurable for fast one-handed adjustments. It is one of the features that really grabbed my attention. The two cameras seem to share the same lovely 3 inch wide-view LCD display, and both support video – the S90 also adds in stereo sound recording. And here things get a little odd. The S90 doesn’t record HD video, or support 16:9 (wide screen) video – unless you count 480p as HD… to be fair, 720p is probably over kill in this format, but the lack of it might put off the ‘box ticking’ buyers, which is a real shame as this is a great camera.

Now, I’m going to let you into a secret: I looked at the new PowerShot G11 as well. I’d ignored it, because quite frankly it looked like a bunch of kids had gone nuts with mecano. It’s got dials and buttons EVERYWHERE. It’s another step up in price from the S90, but still a 10.4 Megapixel camera (the Sx200is is 12.4  - there really isn’t much in it). However, it shoots in RAW mode, which means more chance of rescuing borderline photos in editing back on the Mac/PC. The lens is 28-140mm equivalent, giving a bit more zoom. It’s quite a lot bigger, and double the weight at 12.5oz /355g, but it’s an all together more serious camera. The screen is a little smaller, but flips out and angles, and there is a hot shoe connector for an external flash. It also has a built in view finder, which I actually found quite fun, compared to holding a camera at arms length and looking at a screen.

You’ve probably figured out by now that there are some subtleties to picking out a high end digital camera, you need to think carefully about your budget and what features are most important to you. The S90 nicely slots into the range – if I was after something very high end, like the PowerShot G11, but in a much more compact form, then the S90 looks the business. For a compact camera with full DSLR features, I’d now give the G11 a serious look. All those dials and knobs make it very fast to operate. It is quite big and chunky, but there again it really is pushing the envelope of what a little digital camera can do and is a fraction of the size of a DSLR, even the diminutive 1000D. The PowerShot range now goes in almost every direction from waterproof to bullet proof (almost).

Do remember in all of this, that I’m a bit odd in a) doing lots of candid photography in dark venues (that doesn’t sound good does it? ) and b) my general refusal to use a flash. All of these cameras have very nice built-in flashes which will get you great shots. Flash just isn’t my style. I’m still very happy with my SX200is, its extended zoom range, HD video support and it’s good looks will keep it in my kit bag for a while to come!

Thank you to Canon for coming out to play, and supporting Tuttle. It made for a great morning!

Finally, after a few tweets between Drew Benvie, Matt Brady, Neville Hobson and myself, it is all systems go…  

Drew has written a post about his hopes for TVSMC, and Neville gives a good background on Tuttle/SMC. There are a number of people out this way who regularly trek in to London Tuttle, so that gives a great start. It is wonderful to have something local to the Valley here, which will hopefully open up the opportunity for many more people to experience what happens when on-line and off-line merge.

As Matt Brady says, “[Reading] and its environs is chock-full of digital talent“, so it is time to show your stuff, if you are in the area sign up on the Thames Valley SMC  wiki. Any problems signing up, catch me on twitter or drop me an email and I’ll sort you out. I’ve built three RSS feeds into the site so far:

• RSS feed of the Wiki pages, to keep up with changes/sign ups.
• RSS feed for TVSMC blog (first post pending!).
• RSS feed from the calendar to keep track of dates.

The first gathering is at 10AM on Friday 13th of March. I’ll be there in spirit (since I’ll be in the thick of South by South West Interactive), but there is a healthy crowd going along!