Miramus presents Dork Adore: Lovely things for geeks

We’ve been busy working away on a brand new project over here at Miramus. Please allow me to present to you Dork Adore: Lovely Things for Geeks. A special haven we’ve set up for nerdlingers.

Here’s the blurb:

Dork Adore is brought to you by Katie Lee, founding editor of Shiny Shiny – the first gadgets site written by women for women. Dork Adore isn’t here to give you the latest tech press releases, it’s here to provide the best advice, opinion, reviews and the odd bit of geek news.

Since the site is written by a group of dorks, you’ll find every obsession covered, from TV to beauty; lifehacks to coffee makers. If you want to get in touch, click here.

Please feel free to have a mooch about, maybe click on a few links and read a few articles. And if you’d like to leave us some comments, or email me with any non-crazy thoughts, please do! You can use the contact form on Dork Adore here.

The site is written by Emma and me, as well as lots of very lovely contributors and you can find out more about all of them over on the About page.

Parentdish Update

As you may already know, we’ve been working on AOL’s Parentdish UK site for a while now, and it’s been enjoying a successful few months of late, including a steady increase in traffic, some great articles that have spawned some interesting discussions, and an entry into the Top 100 British Mummy Bloggers!

The British Mummy Bloggers list is updated monthly and voted for by blog readers, so it’s encouraging to see that we’re moving up the chart each time it’s published.

We have a strong writing team at the moment, and so we’re not currently looking for any more regular writers.  However, we would like to hear from you if you have any one-off feature ideas. Please contact us here with your pitch.

Don’t forget, you can also follow Parentdish on Twitter.

The Sway #2: Featuring Gemma Cartwright!

Following on from the success of the previous Sway event, we are delighted to announce that the next The Sway event has been confirmed for the 21st July. We can also confirm that Gemma Cartwright, creator of Big Girls Browse and editor of The Nod, will be one of the Sway debaters.

To find out a little more about Gemma, click here for our interview
For those who were unable to attend the first Sway event in May, have a listen to the podcasts on The Sway website from the debaters.

To attend the event, you can either request an invite from the Sway website, or from the Sway MeetUp group. For up to date information you can also follow The Sway on Twitter

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

The Sway #2: Back for a second helping!

Miramus helped to organise the (if I do say so myself) excellent Sway event in May, and it’s back for a second helping in July. It was a great night, with some really interesting (and short!) talks from some innovative and inspiring web entrepreneurs and general web heads.

I can’t think of another event that’s aimed solely at bloggers, editors and network owners seeking to make money out of their editorial content. Many of the people at the event were people I’ve only ever spoken to on email, or admired from a distance, and putting faces to names made me realise that we should have been running events like this for years.

So if you think you should have been invited (if you run advertising on your blog or website or are monetising it in other ways then this is the event for you), please do request an invite over on the Sway website, or directly via the Sway MeetUp group. You can also follow The Sway on Twitter.

The reason the event is invite only is to protect those attending from being overrun by PRs, widget creators, and other marketeers and developers. There are already plenty of events out there that (quite rightly) allow access for all. But The Sway is solely for those wishing to talk about their businesses with other content providers.

I hope to see you there!

Miramus is helping Skimlinks to spread the word among bloggers

We’re currently working with the people over at Skimlinks to help spread the word about their very clever affiliates service. I’m a big fan of Skimlinks (and can’t say enough nice things about Alicia Navarro, their CEO) and I like the simplicity of what they do. We used them when I was at Shiny, adding their code to our site so that any outbound links to merchants would automatically be converted into affiliate links.

Not only did it save us having to make individual deals with the affiliate companies, it also saved our writers having to go to the trouble of inserting affiliate links into posts. Not to mention the fact that writers could get on with their jobs without having their editorial independence compromised — after all, most of the time they were unaware if the site they were linking would convert into an affiliate link or not.

So when Alicia approached Miramus about helping to pimp them out to the web community, we were more than happy to get involved. Stay tuned for more – we’ll be announcing an excellent blogger event very shortly!

Skimlinks

Miramus at the Crystal Palace Children’s Book Festival

Here at Miramus we’ll turn our hand to anything, which is why we’ve put together a Children’s Book Festival in our home town of Crystal Palace. Heading up the proceedings is children’s author and illustrator (and seasoned blogger), Alex Milway — co-founder of Miramus — who’s hoping to become the Michael Eavis of children’s literary festivals (but without the baldness).

The event is spread out across three venues in the Crystal Palace Triangle and includes art workshops run by renowned illustrators, readings from published authors and an art exhibition by comic book artists and children’s book illustrators.  The event is supported by numerous children’s publishers, including Faber and Faber, Puffin and Walker.

And best of all? It’s completely free!

You can find out more on our Palace Festival website. Come join us!

Blogging for the Telegraph

I started writing for the Telegraph blog today, and you can read my words of undoubted wisdom here

Here’s a little taster:

I’ve known for a while, of course, but I’ve just been suppressing the truth. Now it’s time to come clean and admit it: the internet is stealing my life. It’s not just that I’m an addict (Hi, my name is Katie and I’m a weboholic) it’s also that the more time I spend reading about all the wonderful things the internet can do, the more time I spend on the internet trying to get those wonderful things to work.

I’ll be writing for them regularly, so if you’ve got any ideas for things you’d like to see me turn my keyboard to, do let me know. – Katie at miramus dot com (or just leave a comment)