Being a keen writer and Kindle owner, I’ve been excited about doing something with self-publishing for a couple of years. Bad Dollar is that something: $1 stories about worse ways to spend a dollar.

At first, this was going to be a personal project (I’ve written one of the stories) but I decided to open it up and make it collaborative. So if you’re a writer and want to get involved, why not submit a story.

Hope you like it. And I hope you buy and enjoy just one story. I promise they’re a great way to spend a dollar.

My first published short story. A dark comedy.

Update: You can buy it here for most ebook readers.

Creating the second Balloonacy event (a balloon race across the Internet) for Orange was no small feat. The race course was formed by ‘stitching together’ people’s websites, which was possible thanks to each website owner copying and pasting a bit of code. I was the lead strategist and part-time Creative Director. Did some copy writing too. But it was achieved with the help of far more talented people than me.

My favourite contribution was the ‘waving’ feature that let balloonists and site owners wave to each other to give them a little boost.

We were tasked by children’s charity, Barnardo’s to get the public to acknowledge the challenges facing disadvantaged children in the UK. It was Christmas time – a prime moment for charity messages, but also a poignant moment for everyone as they looked back over the year and forward to the next.

We wanted to elevate the conversation from a personal one to a cultural one, so we invited children across the UK to create an alternative to the traditional Christmas Day Queen’s Speech. Connecting with teenagers across the country, we created The Teens’ Speech:

More info soon.

In December 2009, we had a hack day at Poke. In a nutshell, we had 24 hours to come up with an idea and make it an online reality. It was brilliant, exhausting, stressful, fun and inspiring. Here’s how it worked:

On the eve of hack day, the theme was revealed – food. Then, at 2pm on the 9th December we were divided into teams, evenly spreading Poke’s strategic, creative, design, project management and coding skills as evenly as possible.

We then had one hour to come up with an idea, which we subsequently presented to the rest of the company. Twenty-three hours later, our creations would have to be live and kicking online.

Our team’s idea was to create an egg-timer that served up a Youtube video to match the exact length your egg needed to be boiled for. Have a look for yourself over at eggwatchers.com.

We didn’t have time to make it a mobile app, before you say it ;) oh – and it’s not working on all versions of IE. But Firefox is fine.

Whichever idea receives the most traffic by March wins an amazing dinner out. So if you like eggwatchers.com, please tweet it, shout it, sing it, blog it. We’ve already featured on the BBC Good Food site. But there’s work to do. Help us spread our eggy love.

Update: We won! Up to over 300,000 unique visits :)

Orange asked us to bring to life its strap-line, ‘Together we can do more’ to life. We made a Facebook tool to do just that.

It’s always really bugged me how earnest and important people try to look when they pose for industry rags. I decided to pick on the most serious-looking people and imagine what might be happening outside the frame of the photo.

It was nice that Campaign actually published the images too:

See the whole set here. If you want to get involved with this and do your own Campaign Unframed (or Adweek Unframed) images, please do. We could create a public Flickr group. Who’s in?

You don’t always know what you want to do, but you always know how you feel. I created a series of ‘social maps’ to let people navigate their city by mood, starting with I Feel London.

It was all very lo-fi. I built using iWeb as a proof of concept. A ‘proper’ version is in the pipeline.