The latest Festival of New Writers Uk took place on Saturday 19th September and included a Creative writing workshop: Guest speakers: Independent Publishers: Book stalls: Snapshot presentations: Support for new writers: Secondhand Books: Raffle: Refreshments. Admission and Parking were free.

Guests included Helen Hollick, Author and Scriptwriter: Mark Thornton, Proprietor, Mostly Books:, Abingdon Simon Potter, Publishing Manager, Printondemand – Worldwide: Steve Bowkett, Educational Consultant and Author: Raj Pathak, Film-maker and Producer: Chairman of Nottinghamshire County Council, Councillor David Taylor and his good lady: AuthorHouse UK Ltd and Discovered Author.

The authors present write on subjects and genres including, historical novels, crime, thrillers, true-life stories, children’s and teen fantasy adventures, ghost stories, non-fiction and more.

The Special Event of the day was a creative writing competition for children, with prizes awarded by Des Coleman of BBC East Midlands TV.

The day was a great success deemed by many to the best one ever!

The Borg has decided that the needs of some small businesses are not being met.

He doesn’t speak very often, but when he does, what he says is good. He says that he can offer an inexpensive solution to small businesses that will suit them down to the ground.

With prices starting around £75.00, he’ll build a site, with Home page and basic content.

But don't hang about – call us now.

MKDP is happy to announce the extension of our services to include Web Design for small businesses and organisations.

In conjunction with our web content skills, MKDP is offering up–to–date designs that will be Web Standards Compliant, Accessible and include content guaranteed to attract visitors and increase conversion rates.

The design department will be headed up by an enigmatic character who seems to have an affiliation with the "Stig" of Top Gear fame. An "Enterprise Webmaster" with design and coding skills covering a broad spectrum, it’s said he dreams in binary code and that you can’t stand too close if he isn't properly earthed.

All we know is he’s called "The Borg"!

"Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin."

The opening line to a newly established group who offer help and advice to budding but unpublished authors.

An optimistic trio of authors (now self-published) formed New Writers UK. Following the average replies of "The book’s too long", and "The book’s too short", and "it’s not quite what we are looking for at the moment, but we wish you well for the future’, they got together and did their own research into self publishing.

That, they say, was where the fairy tale ended and reality set in. Undaunted, this gutsy trio decided to form New Writers UK.

The authors, Andrew de Berry, John Lalor and Karen Wright, have now self-published their first (sometimes second) books and are sharing their wisdom through New Writers UK. Along the way, they’ve added more members, attracted the friendship of well-known authors, film makers and other celebrities, attracted various media coverage and helped other budding authors. They’ve organised two festivals and there’s another coming up on Sept 29th, where there are opportunities for unpublished authors to meet people who have experienced the knock-backs and had to go the self–publishing route.

So if you’ve got a book in you, you won't go too far wrong by getting in touch with New Writers UK.

Have you seen the amount of people with digital cameras now?

They come in all shapes and sizes. They’re in mobile phones and on key fobs. Or they’re small Kodak types, or big Nikon types. People are snapping away at anything and everything.

And for the owners of proper, real digital cameras, the number of photos taken amount to thousands. In the past, of course, people were a little more careful. They could only take so many snaps because of the exposures on the films they used to use. No such restrictions now. No worries about the film or the development costs. Just download to the Home PC and Bob’s your proverbial.

Is it really that simple?

What happens when you haven’t got a home PC? Or your PC can’t handle large quantities of images? What if the sheer quantity of images is too difficult to organise? Even worse, what if your PC decides to go belly up and you lose everything?

More and more people are turning to Digital Photo Albums as a means to overcoming the problems caused by the digital camera era. These albums come in various forms. From one end of the market there’s the CD you get from the photo shop or Asda with all your images on. It’ll play on your DVD in a very straight-forward way. At the top-end of the market, there’s the super DVD that has all sorts of special effects and a soundtrack. There are plenty of options.

What we all have to understand, is that to most people, they’re not just photographs. They’re a record of our lives. They’re a historical account of the times we live in that we want to share with our family, our friends and the people who come after us. They are irreplaceable!

So what are you going to do to avoid the disaster of losing all your digital images?

The old style of web was about connecting computers and making technology more efficient for computers. Web 2.0 is about connecting people, and making technology better for people.

What does that mean?

It revolves, in a way, around democracy. There are many examples of amateurs outdoing the professionals – wikipedia for one. A free facility for information for everyone by everyone. Sounds mad, but that, so the pundits say, is where the success comes from. To enable this, there’s a programming language around, called Ajax. This language makes it possible to run web-based applications as if they were on your desktop.

So that would be a second ingredient, languages like Ajax enabling user friendly platforms for web applications. And we see these applications everyday - myspace, you tube and etc. The content is, effectively, provided by the users on platforms provided by the site. And the site is moderated by users. No heavy handed editors deciding what should and should not go on the web. The users decide.

That brings us into a third ingredient that is perhaps the least popular among the business community. The user is everything. If you can’t get users to your site, if you can't keep them there and if you can't convert their interest, your site’s not doing what you want it to. One of the nicest things you can do for visitors to your website, is give them something - free. That’s why this isn’t a popular concept. But by giving something, you increase the possibilties of receiving something. You encourage users to move further along the road with their interest in you.

It appears that these three ingredients are the packaging that hold the concept of Web 2.0 together. Maybe this is how the web was always going to be, we don’t know. But we can see that Users are in the driving seat and developers, designers and eCommercers are going to have to take heed.

Coming soon – Some of the intracacies of Web 2.0 design and content.