I've been toying with the idea of launching a travel website for awhile now; there are so many things that I learn every day, so many moments that remind me how far from home I am in both good and bad ways. There are a lot of travel websites out there, but most of them are either quite commercial or very personal. I am really excited for the new site,  A Tramp Abroad, to focus on helpful, quirky tips but also feature really outstanding longer form travel writing. Oh, and our tag line is 'Inspiring wanderlust." Perfect, no?

I'll still be writing here - this will always be the place I feel like I can unload about all the more personal experiences and feelings that are niggling at me and on occasion I'll post links to any longer form pieces I write on the other website.

We've got some shorter news pieces up already along with a few bits of original content that I hope you'll check out -

• Dreaming About Egypt: Advice for Western Travelers
• Traveling Light Pep Talk: Getting Ready for the Journey
• Top Five Tips: Questions to Ask When Renting in the Tropics

It's still very much a work in progress but feedback is very much welcome. Also, we're looking for guest bloggers so if you have any ideas, please let me know.
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 Over the past few weeks, Dan and I have been working on a site to formalise some of the freelance work we've become involved in. We've called our venture Contentini because our focus is really on content strategy and enabling people to create really exciting, on point online content for their websites.

Our four offerings fall into the categories of: Website Content Analysis, Web Content Strategy, Copywriting and Social Media Services. We aren't taking on a lot of clients and it's lovely to be able to make a decision to work with companies that we feel passionate about. It just feels like a new day and I can't wait to see what happens over the next six months to one year.

We are currently working on creating interesting content for our own site and have begun the slow process of building up our page rank; if people can't find us when they search for our services, we're not going to be terribly successful. This morning we posted a fairly extensive blog item called An Analysis of UK Parliamentary Language: 1935-2010 and were lucky enough to get a shout-out from Boing Boing, which is always great because they send through lots of engaged visitors. We posted the item about six hours ago and we're nearing the 1,000 visitors mark. Of course, it isn't all a numbers game, but it is gratifying to see that many people clicking through to read your post - especially as this one was fairly labour intensive.

Alright chickens, I'm heading to the pool to sit out this hundred degree heat.

PS: Our blog is going to be good - you can subscribe to it here. We're also on Twitter and would love some followers :)

I've been working with the lovely team over at Exuberance Beauty on a special mother's day feature for their website. We've been lucky enough to have the participation of some wonderful writers who have shared their experiences and the result is a pretty inspiring group of posts - you can read them all here. (PS: for UK readers, North American Mother's Day is this Sunday)

I struggled a bit with my post, because I am not a mother and cannot claim to understand what that experience means. Initially when I sat down to write, I thought I would pull together something more political about how women and mothers in particular still struggle (I've been very inspired by J K Rowling's Single Mother's Manifesto). But instead of being clever, I kept coming back to the memory of a particularly difficult summer my mother and I had with my sister Jennifer (pictured above at her graduation), who suffers from a number of physical challenges in addition to being sensory deprived and autistic.

If you want to read the entire piece, you can do so here. Also, Exuberance is a pretty great company - they make healthy, organic, lotions and potions you can feel good about using. And, importantly, they give back to their community. If you are still struggling to find something to buy your mother for the holiday this weekend, you might want to check them out.

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My industrious other half Dan has created a nifty new creativity app called Penolo that allows people to draw and share their sketches on Twitter or by embedding them onto your blog or website.

It's still in beta, so there are some kinks to iron out, but it is a pretty great little tool. One of my favourite things about it is that it enables collaboration by allowing users to create hybrid sketches by adapting what others have created (the original also stays in tact).

You don't need an account and it's free to use - so give it a go!

Here are some of my favourite sketches from the last few weeks:
(for those of you viewing this on a reader - I'm sorry but you'll need to click through to the actual post to see the images... as I said, still working out some glitches.)


By studiobrazley


By bkcl


By bkcl


By Caro Wallis1


By Mearso


By Sianz


By Handy Bite Size


By Rich_R


By Speak Criptic


By Mark Turner

Some of you may have guessed that something like this was coming, especially since I posted an advertisement to fill my current job earlier today ... Big news indeed... Dan and I have decided to leave the UK to spend a year traveling around the world. We've been talking about it for awhile and during a lot of that talking, I was pretty convinced that it was just that, talking. But then we bought plane tickets, and have started selling off our belongings, and have given notice at our flat and ... well, it is really happening, and soon.

We fly out of London on May 1st and we've got a series of flights that takes us right around the globe and back into London mid-April 2011. Our intention is to spend a number of weeks - in some cases months - in our various locations and during our North American stint, we'll mostly be house-sitting/staying with lovely, generous friends.. We don't want fleeting, stressful experiences of wonderful places - we're going to spend some time, get to know the flavour of things. We're also going to be doing some freelance work while traveling, details TBA. So if you need anything brilliant done and want to talk, please get in touch.

In the meantime, here's a little map to show you (somewhat inaccurately) many of the places we'll be touching down - you should be able to click on the image to for more detail. If anyone has any suggestions of places you think we absolutely need to fit into our journey - particularly in South East Asia - please do let us know.


Good night beautiful people.

I've had a pretty good few days.


Yesterday we held the second ever Ignite London event (thanks to committee members Dan, Richard, Craig and Andy). For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Ignite concept, it is a very community-spirited event featuring a series of talks that follow a rigid format: each speaker has 20 slides, which are auto-timed to advance every 15 seconds. As a result, every talk is exactly 5 minutes long.

We had a capacity crowd at a really lovely venue in Kilburn, London called The Luminaire but more important than the numbers, everyone was really positive, engaged and genuinely excited to be there. The speakers were great - some funny, some serious and I genuinely learned something from each one of them. We were really lucky to have a few 'celebrity' speakers in the mix, including Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing and Russell Davies of the Interesting Conference and Newspaper Club.

The other very cool thing is that our event was held as part of Global Ignite Week. Thousands of Ignite talks are happening around the world - from New York and Sydney to Anchorage, Bangalore and Morocco. It's wonderful to be a part of something with such a global reach.

We're in the process of uploading the talks from last night but in the meantime, you can check out the new O'Reilly website devoted to broadcasting and in some cases live streaming the events. We've also created a Tweet doc to aggregate all the Twitter action (well over 200 tweets) from last night, which you download here (PDF). My favourite Tweet:

@mahemoff: Ignite is TED, only cool ;) Thanks #igniteLDN2 organisers for a night of superb presentations.

In more great news, another one of my photographs has been featured on the wonderful Pictory. This particular story is about Neighbourhood Treasures and my photo is of The Water Rats Theatre bar near Kings Cross in London (number 18 on the list). It's especially cool because this particular photo story was curated by Good. For those of you unfamiliar with them:

GOOD is a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward. Since 2006 we've been making a magazine, videos, and events for people who give a damn.

And the cherry on top is that the Neighbourhoods feature on Pictory has also just been covered on Boing Boing. Ah, the magic of the web - it all really is connected!

So, despite the fact that I am physically exhausted I am also brimming with gratitude directed at pretty much everyone I've come in contact with over the past few days - whether in the 'real' world or online. The encouragement and support is lovely and truly appreciated. x

Read it here



Read it here.



Read it here.



Read it here.

We just got back from Val D'Isere, France on Saturday night - more on that another time (oh the stories!). It hasn't been all fun and games though. When I'm not at my full time job, here are some of the things I've been spending my time on:



We've been tooling away at this little project and although sometimes it's hard to make time for it, I genuinely think it's an interesting little online space. I was really excited when the amazing Cory Doctorow linked to one of my posts on the wonderful Boing! Boing!, resulting in thousands of hits to the page. I'll admit that I was a bit star struck (Cory Doctorow said, "Amy sez!!!" OH. MY.).

Anyhow, here are links to some recent posts by me:

• Murder Inc.- The Psychology of the Battlefield
• iPhone Users Keep Snow Reporting Honest
• Enchanted Dolls
• Orson Welles on Privacy, the Passport and Personal Rights (you can read what Boing! Boing! has to say about the post here)
• The Love of a Powerful Woman

Lost and Looking is a project I came up with because I find the Missed Connections posts on Craig's List to be heartbreaking, sad and hopeful all at the same time. I am also trying to take more photos and push myself a little bit in terms of what I am photographing. The goal is to post one image a day to loosely correspond to a Missed Connection post from the previous day. You can learn more about it here, follow along on Twitter or join the Facebook group. Oh, and this was my first experience buying and figuring out how to use my own domain name. Yay me!


I am currently working with a fantastic group of people to bring Ignite London #2 to this wonderful city. The first one was amazing - great speakers, a supportive, capacity crowd and a wonderful venue partner in Ginglik. The next Ignite London will be held on Tuesday, March 2nd at The Luminaire to coincide with Global Ignite Week. O'Reilly has managed to get people from six continents and 60 cities involved and are expecting 600+ talks and over 10,000 people to be involved. There's even one being held in Antarctica!

It is pretty cool to be involved in this kind of global event. I also love the sense that we're all working towards creating this great experience together, though in some cases we are located hundreds of thousands of miles away from one another. We are currently accepting proposals from speakers (until February 9th) and will be releasing information on tickets within days - along with the launch of a new website and an announcement about some pretty fantastic speakers we've already confirmed. If you want to follow along, visit the Ignite London website or follow us on Twitter.



Last, but nicest, is that we're getting married this spring. Neither of us are fussy wedding people and we're just going to do something very small with a few very close friends and family. I really never thought I was the marrying kind, but I'm excited about this - not the wedding itself but being married to this particular, quirky, kind, wonderful man.

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Those are the highlights, crammed in between a week in the French Alps and obsessive reading of the Steig Larsson Millennium trilogy. I've got a few things up my sleeve yet and have been doing a little bit of freelance work for some lovely companies in my homeland. It's not perfect and sometimes I feel a little overrun, but as the days stretch longer and it gets a little brighter outside, the only word that feels really appropriate right now is, swoon!

How has your January been? Are you working on anything you are proud of? I'd love to hear about it.

I haven't posted much about it here, but Dan and I have been planning the first Ignite London and it's happening tonight at Ginglik in Shepherd's Bush. Doors open at 7 pm and the talks will start between 7:45 and 8 pm. Admission is free.

Ignite was started in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Radar and Bre Pettis of Make. Since then hundreds of five minute talks have been given across the world. Besides Seattle, there are thriving Ignite communities in Portland, Sydney, NYC and a lot more. The idea is simple: presenters are required to stick to a rigid format of 20 slides, each of which changes automatically after 15 seconds, ensuring that each presentation is exactly 5 minutes long. The format forces presenters to think long and hard about every slide.
We have some really great presenters lined up and I am genuinely looking forward to hearing their talks. If you are in the neighbourhood, be sure to check it out and say hello.

A last word of thanks to our sponsors: presenting sponsor Box UK, venue sponsor Ginglik (especially Colin for all his help) and non-monetary promotional sponsors the BBC and O’Reilly. Most important, thanks to all of tonight’s speakers who have donated their time, energy and creativity to creating an interesting and eclectic range of talks.

Read the post here.

Above image by Litill .