It’s time to finally admit defeat. This poor blog hasn’t been updated regularly in a year. It’s time to throw in the towel.

The truth is, the last thing I want to do when I come home from working in social media is write about social media. (I wrote a post about that trend on our Onlinefire company blog, actually.) That’s why I’ve been concentrating on my food blog, om nom London. Om nom serves a happy purpose – chronicling my adventures in London and giving me a rest from the day-to-day world of work work work.

So, until further notice, Fake Plastic Noodles is closed for business.

I’ve just renewed the domain for this blog. Even though I haven’t updated properly with anything in ages -  I just couldn’t bear to let it go.

Three years ago I started this blog because I was planning on a move to London.  I was nervous, but excited. I worried about my job, driving, where I would live – everything. A year and two weeks later it had finally come to fruition, and I touched down in shitty Terminal 4 ready to start a new life. Today, I’m here, and life is good.

I should make a better effort in writing everything down (the stuff that doesn’t have to do with food, for example), but it’s tough.  FPN emerged into more social media/PR by default of me preparing a job and country change, but the aim of the blog was always supposed to be ‘American in London’ crazy times.  So, here’s a few things I’ve done that I’ve been proud of in the last year:

• Went bouldering (this weekend, actually) at The Castle in Finsbury Park. My muscles feel like they’ve been put through an organ grinder
• Travelled to Turkey, France and Romania (and going to Spain at the end of the month!)
• Got a promotion
• Discovered Percy Pigs, and finally got a taste for salt and vinegar on chips
• Went to Wimbledon
• Failed at ice skating
• Managed to spend a majority of my summer weekends outside
• Sat next to two out of three Harry Potter for two separate meals (Rupert Grint at V Festival, Emma Watson at my birthday dinner
• Was introduced to the wonders of Spaced (how in the world has that show not been shown on BBC America? American friends, you’d love it) and have subsequently watched the series twice in a row
• Joined Cycle Hire, and am now cycling the streets of London on a mobilised Barclay’s advert

You can see why I haven’t updated the blog in a while.  Thanks to everyone who hasn’t unsubscribed. I’ll update sporadically, I’m sure. Not ready to give up on this baby yet!

Well, bad news is we didn’t win – good news is we have another chance (by the dreaded public vote). So….That means we need your help! Please go to the Nom Nom Nom 2010 finalists voting page and vote for The Tarragons of Virtue. We’d be very grateful!

The Tarragons of Virtue need your help!

While you’re there, please consider donating to the real cause of Nom Nom Nom, Action Against Hunger. For every £10 donation, you get a charity raffle ticket with the choice of some amazing foodie prizes. Definitely worth it.

Thanks!

It’s certainly not an Earth-shattering representation, but it’s a very clever way to visualise it. Thumbs up to Intac for some brilliant linkbait.

There’s a debate going on about whether or not to turn comments off on a blog. While I don’t believe a blog is truly a blog without comments, I’ve actually been thinking about turning the comments off on here – at least for posts older than two months.  It’s not because anyone’s being too mean on here, which was the reason Engadget recently shut comments down. It’s because the whole point of a blog is two-way communication, and with the exception of my newer posts, that is not happening. Instead, I’m getting crafty selfish spam that I have to take time out of my day to deal with.

Spam has evolved to the point where it’s difficult to tell if anyone is actually reading this.  I receive, on average, about 10 comments a week on random posts from the last two and half years telling me how ‘brilliant’ my writing is, or how they’re ‘really happy they’ve come across the site’ and how they’re ‘instantly hooked and have immediately subscribed’.  There are never any spam pr0n-esque links in the body of the comments, but instead links to the most ridiculous off-topic sites. Rugby? Panama Travel? You name it, they’re supposedly reading my blog.  Flattered as I might be that I’m reaching such an eclectic audience, their motives are disingenuous, and it pissed me off.

Linkbuilding is an increasingly popular business. Getting more ‘influential’ links to your website means Google thinks you’re more important and theoretically raises your Page Rank. Everyone’s doing it too – SEO people, PRs (yep, like me, but sooo not in this way), media agencies, digital agencies and of course your random Harvard Law blogs who are ‘always ‘researching online for articles that can help me get further ahead’. The latter example being a comment I received this morning on a post called ‘Klassin’ it Up in the Blogosphere’, which was all about the most offensive things I found on the Internet that week in September of 2007 (including a BBC story about a man who peed on a dying woman and deemed it You Tube-appropriate). I would love to see how that story will help them in their career. Really. I’m all ears.

So, yes, I think I will turn off comments on all posts older than 60 days. Sorted.

**Photo from WORD: The official blog of Read Magazine.

January is always a weird month of self-reflection. Partly because of the after-holidays low, partly because everyone is obsessed with reinventing themselves in the New Year, partly because it’s my birthday month, and I feel obligated to take a step back examine my life.

I’ve been in London for about a year and a half – a year and a half that’s flown by like nothing. And while it’s all I thought it would be, there’s been a lot that I didn’t see coming. Like my recent bleedingly obvious realisation: London is normal. Not so much in the ordinary sense, because I think that’s the furthest thing from the truth, but normal as in everyday.

It’s an odd change when you start to bend what your definition of ‘home’ is. When I moved away from my mom’s to go to Eastern, I remember it taking about 8 or 12 months before I stopped saying ‘I’m going home for the weekend’ and started saying ‘I’m going to my mom’s house’.

For some people, home is where they sleep at night. For others, it’s the house they grew up in. For me, it will always be Michigan. However, 18 months on from moving countries, I’m starting to get a bit confused. When I was in Michigan, there were at least a few times when I said ‘Well, when I get back ho- I mean, to London’.

I am officially at the Home Home vs. Home stage.

I realised all of this coming back into London after Christmas. I really loved being home home and visiting everyone, but as soon as my key opened the door, and I collapsed on my not-very-comfortable bed, I was really happy just to be home.

If that makes sense.

Personally, I don’t think blogging is dead, but I do wonder if there’s room for many more of them.  I don’t mean to say that new blogs aren’t created everyday ( Istarted om nom London this year, after all), and certainly not that newer blogs aren’t interesting, but how many of them are going to organically rise to the top from the dredges of the overly-saturated blogosphere?

When is that last time you heard about a new blogger who started out with just a free template, and ended up making it big? It feels like we no longer ask ourselves who the next Scoble or Cashmore will be. They are established. They are unreachable. You don’t see many people starting blogs to acheive fame, as it used to be. They use Twitter instead.

Would love someone to prove me wrong though…

Looking at Twitter from the time I joined to now is an experiment in hyper-evolution.

A couple years ago, I made the disastrous mistake of saying I didn’t think Twitter was going to be any big “thing” and it was just a lot of hype over nothing (this was after a good 7 months of sporadic use).  But then, we all know what happened. It grew, it evolved and it became useful for things both personal and professional.

For a while, we hit the sweet spot – people sharing information, people getting information, meeting face to face. It seemed like Twitter could do no wrong.

The next stage began to evolve with celebrity involvement. For once, the masses could get a glimpse into what Stephen Fry‘s life is like. This made the perfect transition into Twitter as entertainment. Some people can’t even imagine watch The X-Factor without a live Tweet stream.

Now, with lists and trending topics, I can’t help but wonder if it’s all too much?  I know I’ve scaled back my Twitter usage in general. I’m at my limit at the amount of people I can follow (lists or no lists), and the amount of information is bordering on overload.

I’m not saying Twitter is over – far from it.  But it’s been a couple years now… I think we’re all waiting for the next thing.

Congratulations to Eulogy! – Onlinefire‘s sister agency who won Agency of the Year at last night’s PRCA Awards!

Eulogy! had been nominated for three awards: Agency of the Year, Specialist Agency of the Year and Best B2B campaign. We also at Onlinefire had been shortlisted for Best Technology Campaign as well for work that we did with Virgin Mobile and its 30p tariff last year. Remember that one?

At the end of the night Eulogy not only scooped up Best Agency, but also Best B2B Campaign for their work with Mortascreen.

And as Helen said on the Eulogy! blog, “Apologies if we deafened anyone sitting near us. We were the noisiest and most fun-loving crowd in the room!”

The article is about how PRs are having an increasingly difficult time working with proper journalists in the online space…

Online and offline PRs used to have very distinct roles.  Instead of print journalists, online worked with ‘bloggers’; instead of pitching to news desks, online had conversations with ‘influencers’. It was all very clear-cut.

But now, with social media officially in the mainstream, PR is going through an identity crisis. Whether this is another effect of the recession – publications going online-only or newspapers completely shutting down – no one can say for sure. But what is evident is that the lines between online and offline PR are blurring fast, particularly with national newspapers.

Most newspapers used to have separate online and offline news desks. Increasingly, there is little difference between the content that’s in print and the content that can be found online.  You can sell in what you believe to be a story for print and then find it on the web site only in a few hours time.  With publications vying to be the first to break a story, it seems that the immediacy of online has begun to take the lead over print.

With all this ambiguity, it’s very difficult to have a thorough understanding of who covers what space – and the tools that PRs normally use to research exactly this type of information don’t necessarily work in an online world.

To read the rest, do head over to Reputation Online.  there are a few comments on there already, but it would be great to keep the conversation going.

Ta!

Yes, I finally made it to the Flackenhacks (or as they were called this year in tribute to the late King of Pop – the Jackenhacks).  This is the third year for the awards. The first one was shortly after I started this blog and The World’s Leading gave me my first plug introducing me to the London PR scene. I was gutted I couldn’t go, and promised to go the second year’s, but that didn’t actually end up happening. I believe it was because I had just moved to London and my bank account was in dire straits.

I suppose that brings me to the cost this year… and meh – not so impressed.  Don’t get me wrong, I had a lovely time, but for £35 I ended up having two glasses of wine and a few nibbles. I can’t remember what time the bar actually ran out, but I think it was around 10, 10:30? The food was really tasty, but that too, was available for way too short  a time. The poor lady going around with the tray was nearly attacked everytime she came out of the kitchen.

The awards themselves, while funny enough, were completely impossible to hear since people talked through the whole thing.

Anyhoo, suffice to say I had a much better time when we retired to Murphy’s to sing American Pie and Total Eclipse of the Heart at a ridiculously loud level.

Oh, and also watching girls trying to rip off Tim Hoang‘s shirt while he took down Brendan Cooper was pretty funny too.

The US has announced a crackdown on product endorsements. For years, we’ve all been used to seeing celebs and models hawking everything from car insurance to beauty products, but surprisingly this ruling isn’t limited to Iggy Pop or Sarah Jessica Parker – it includes bloggers too.

The new rules say that anyone endorsing a product must give full disclosure about what he or she received – if anything – in compensation for the endorsement or else face fines up to $11,000.

Oddly enough, an attorney for several advertising groups in the States said this ruling is the ‘worst fears of businesses have come true’. That seems a bit of an overreaction to me. It won’t be a surprise to people that celebs are paid to endorse products (or even lie about them), and most bloggers I know already do disclose the terms in which they’re either endorsing or reviewing a product, i.e. So-and-so asked me to review, I wasn’t paid for this post, etc.

I’m curious to hear what other bloggers think, but my hunch is that we spend so much time trying to prove that we haven’t sold out that this ruling (should it ever make its way across the pond) won’t change very much at all.

Yes, I’m alive. And I come with good excuses. Here are the Top 5 things I’ve been up to in the last month

1. Living in London for a year:

The 22nd of August 2009 was my one-year anniversary of moving to London. I spent it in the Louder Lounge at V Festival with work. It was sunny, I saw The Killers and hung out with a chick who’s famous for having her backside projected on the Houses of Parliament.

2. Holiday
I went home for two whole weeks! I’ve never had two whole weeks off of work in my life since I started working.

Living in London, you tend to get this sort of tunnel vision where things on the outside don’t register as much. Like, if it’s 10pm here and 5pm at home, I have a really hard time putting myself in that place – imagining what it’s like to be in Michigan.

This trip home sort of put that in perspective. I didn’t realise how much I missed my mom, my dad and my friends until I was there. I had an amazing time. It was brilliant.

Plus, the weather was amazing!

3. Not being social:
Post-holiday, I’ve pretty much been invisible. Really what I’ve been doing is saving money and being on a massive diet (I ate WAY TOO MUCH in Michigan). Soup and porridge FTW.

4. Work:
I don’t think I’ve ever taken a holiday where somehow, it complemented out with my workload. Seriously: the two weeks I was gone, were the two calmest weeks of work ever. I even had a pretty calm Monday back. Things then, of course, picked back up and now… well… back to normal!

5. Computering:
My computer sort of died. Or at least the hard drive did. Yesterday I was getting ready to go to the gym and I heard this buzzing/grinding rattle of death. I thought that maybe a terminally ill fly got into my room somehow, but when I tracked it down to my computer and saw it frozen, I knew it couldn’t be good. I tried to restart, but then got this**:

BUT, my new roomie did some voodoo, and has me working off of Snow Leopard on an external hard drive until my new 250gb hard drive and 2gb of ram arrive on Friday.

So things are fantastic. I’m still giddy at the thought of living in London, still love my job, still have amazing friends and family back home, and am just about to get a computer makeover. Who could ask for more?***

**Photo yanked from this blog because I wan’t smart enough to grab my camera when I saw the Folder of Death.
***I may or may not be drinking wine while writing this.

(Oh, 1500 hours, apparently. Jesus. H. Christ.)

Anyhoo, the interview was published today, so go ahead – give it some sugar.

PR Blogger and Social Media Blogger Melanie Seasons of Fake Plastic Noodles, an Interview

I’m quite proud, but embarrassed all the same. Mainly because A) I totally forgot to update yesterday in honour and B) My last actual post was 2 weeks ago.

I go back and forth about what to do about the latter, but I fear this trend of infrequent posting will continue a bit.  Some changes at onlinefire have meant that I have been super super busy and thus have had little time for thoughtful blogging.  However, since we have a new addition to our team in the form of Andrew Boyers, which means hopefully my life should get a little easier. He’s brilliant – you should follow him on Twitter.

In the meantime, I always have to eat and have therefore found it much easier to crank posts out at om nom London. So if I’m not over here, I’m definitely over there.

And if you want a trip down memory lane, this was my first ever post.  My, how much has changed…

I like how I started out this blog – posts everyday, not always about PR, fun things I’ve found online, US/UK expat stuff.  Perhaps I should return to that format.  When I have a bit more time :)

Anyhoo, thanks for reading still, people. You’re all swell.

When I was back in the States, much of the debate concerning PR and bloggers surrounded what was the relatively new phenomenon of Mommy blogging – and now, just a few years later, it’s arrived in the UK.

And it’s happening pretty much exactly how I remember it:

• A couple PRs start hearing about how other PRs are pitching mommy bloggers and how those mommy bloggers are totally up for getting free stuff. (And plus it’s effective and cheap.)
• A lot of those mommy bloggers ARE totally up for getting free stuff and blogging about
• PRs assume that all mommy bloggers are all up for getting free stuff and blogging about it
• So they start sending blanket press releases about any product whether or not it’s relevant
• A lot of the moms start getting really pissed off because they’re inboxes are inundated with e-mails from PR people expecting to get ‘free advertising’ on their blogs
• Discussion between all the moms on their respective blogs with little input from the PR community they’re actually talking about because the PRs don’t listen anyhow.

But now in the States, there’s been a new development – A proposed PR Blackout from MomDot, where they’re asking all mommy bloggers to refrain from posting any content that comes from PR for a week in August.

Here’s why I don’t think it’s a good idea…

1. If you don’t want to participate in product reviews or interact with PR, don’t just do it for one week. Sorry, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
2. If you do want to participate in product reviews or take pitches from PRs, it’s up to you how often it influences your editorial content. It’s YOUR blog. You set the tone. Don’t let anyone – other Mommy bloggers or PRs – tell you otherwise.
3. Not doing giveaways or posts based on PR pitches for a week doesn’t prove anything. It’s misplaced passive aggression. The shit PRs won’t even be aware of the blackout because they’re clearly not reading the blogs anyhow, right?
4. If you need to “step back and breathe” like one commenter put, you don’t need a PR blackout to do it. Switch off your computer. Sorted.

The debate has made it over here, with some of the top parenting bloggers in the UK weighing in.

However, the thoughts on this side of the pond are mixed, but leaning toward anti-blackout (Go Mums!).  Susanna over at A Modern Mother asks if Mummy bloggers need a code of ethics or if they should just ignore PR completely?

Commenters go both ways, but what I find most interesting is that the two worlds are colliding. A few years ago, mummy bloggers were a very closed off community, not even really interacting with their American counterpoints from what I could tell.  Now Mommy blogger/PR news is taking over everywhere.

I’ve written a few Mommy/Mummy posts before, and I know some of my Mommy Bloggers back from the States still read this, so I’d be curious to hear their thoughts on this blackout malarkey.

Cathy?  BusyMom? Mel? Christine? Anyone else?

How has Mommy Blogging and the PR relationship changed in the last year?

Reading these Momdot posts and rebuttals, it certainly seems like things haven’t changed much…