Hi everyone! Just a quick note to say that Handpicked Media is officially on Christmas break starting today (22/12/11).

We’ll back and open for business again beginning 3rd January 2012.

If you need anything in the meantime please use the following contacts:

Ad operations: chris@handpickedmedia.co.uk

General inquires: dil@handpickedmedia.co.uk

Everything else: krista@handpickedmedia.co.uk

Have a brilliant Christmas and a happy New Year!

Aussie's going BIG! A warm welcome at our Aussie event...

We had a brilliant night with Aussie this week to celebrate the launch of their new BIG sizes. Since we all can’t get enough of them, Aussie have released super sized versions of their best-selling shampoos and conditioners including Colour Mate and Miracle Moist.

Aussie Ambassador Liz Taw (who, among other celeb clients, has been styling dreamy Gary Barlow on this year’s X Factor) was on hand for individual haircare/styling tips – check out this stunning 5 minute ‘do on Katie from Katie’s Beauty Blog!

Styled by Liz Taw for Aussie

Thanks to Aussie for a very fun and informative evening – keep an eye on our blogs for their bespoke tips and tricks from Liz!

Just a quick post to say thank you to everybody who attended Handpicked Media Gets Social today! We had brilliant and inspirational talks from Garry Davis, Rebecca Miskin, Sháá Wasmund, Mark Borkowski and Jane Cunningham as well as lively discussion and debate on our Beauty and Fashion panels.

Better still, #HPMSocial trended on Twitter nationwide 3 separate times during the event! A huge success all round, thanks to all who tweeted/re-tweeted and a special thanks to our speakers and sponsors.

Keep an eye on this site for updates, pictures and video from the event in the coming week.

If you represent a brand and are interested in supporting the next #HPMSocial event, please contact Krista at krista@handpickedmedia.co.uk

If you’re a blogger or agency and would like to register your interest to attend the next #HPMSocial, click here to submit your details!

We are pleased to announce that yesterday we officially launched our Handpicked Community.

There are so many great blogs that we want to include in our Handpicked family but some are just not quite ready to join our Collective. By building our Handpicked Community we can stay in touch with you and hope that the community will become a useful stepping stone to help bloggers grow and expand their blogs further, with a view to eventually joining Handpicked Media Collective. The HPC is a collection of fledgling  and established blogs which although are not part of our collective have still been handpicked by us to join.

Members of the community will receive press releases about brands,  invitations, samples and exclusives but only from us here at Handpicked Media, we will not be passing your details on to third parties.

We are excited about this new venture and from last night’s Twitter activity we can see you are too! Click the image below to see what our new community members have been saying about it all!

If you are a blogger and wish to apply to join the Handpicked Community please email debbie@handpickedmedia.co.uk

If you are an agency and would like to enquire about our Handpicked Community outreach service please do email Debbie at the above too.

Many of us will have trials to overcome during a lifetime, but thankfully most of us will only have one trouble to deal with at an time. Jessica Jones, editor of Chemo Chic, initially set up the blog as a method of coping with her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Soon it became a bit more than that turning into a forensic investigation of the beauty products in her bathroom. She has now published her memoir, ‘The Elegant Art of Falling Apart’, which tracks addiction, a broken love affair, emotional upset and living with cancer. Her story of strength and recovering is truly inspiring, visit Chemo Chic and look out for the novel which is published by Hachette Australia.

Come join us at the best blogger event of 2011, #HPMSocial!

When – 21st November 2011
Where – RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects): 66 Portland Place, London W1.

Handpicked Media has hosted over 40 highly successful blogger events with our exclusive collective of bloggers and now we’re putting on our largest event to date – open to all with a passion for blogging!

Handpicked Media Gets Social is the place for bloggers to meet, mingle and enjoy sessions with a host of some of the best people in social media plus some of the biggest brands.

For Bloggers
The day will include sessions on how to grow your blog, how to form relationships with companies and brands and PR’s. Find out what makes a truly great blog and how to turn your blog into a brand. Meet & listen to some of the most successful fashion & beauty bloggers in the UK.

For Brands
This is not just another Social Media Conference, we will be pulling in an audience taken from our own stable of highly influential and successful bloggers and mixing it up with those that are on their way to joining them.

For more details and to book tickets head to handpickedmediagetssocial.com

In an unfamiliar part of town and looking for something interesting and different to do? Look no further as Culture Compass has launched! This virtual compass, launched by  Courvoisier The Future 500 members Loma-Ann Marks (founder and editor of online arts and culture magazine Culture Compass, formerly Open Magazine and member of Handpicked Media) and David Prior (technologyspecialist) will direct you to your next exciting culture event while inviting you to become a Culture Spotter and suggest your own creative happening, be it a gig, play, exhibition, reading or recital – you decide what fits the term ‘culture.’ Since 2008, Courvoisier The Future 500 has challenged members from different backgrounds to come up with an exciting and innovative business proposition and in 2010 awarded the winning concept £10,000 to bring it to life. The result of 2010’s competition is Culture Compass.  So join this community of culture aficionados connecting, sharing and shaping the cultural landscape at iTunes or on Android visit here.

This is a brand that’s been around a long, long time (50 years to be precise) and it’s always great to get together with the Creative Beauty Director of  Head & Shoulders, Peter Lux. Peter is a creative whizz and once everyone had relaxed with a fairly lethal cocktail or two, they all had a chance to create (under Peter’s watchful eye of course) some really impressive looks with a ‘head of hair’ dummy and a selection of styling tools. In homage to the age of the brand, we all created a classic ‘Audrey’ then moved on to a more on-trend look straight from the catwalks with a sort of Rock ‘n’ Roll meets Forties up-do. Several more lethal cocktails and a few mini-burgers later and the Handpicked Media bloggers left The St Martins Lane Hotel with some great pictures and blog post inspiration.

Here is Emma from Beautyandthedirt and The Beauty Button having a Champney’s hand massage…

Leading women’s magazine Cosmopolitan have launched their second Annual Cosmopolitan Blog Awards and Handpicked Media are partnering to judge the lifestyle category. We will be looking for blogs that are a bit different so if you’ve got a blog that covers subjects that we haven’t seen before, written with style, a unique take and bags of personality then make sure you enter and let us know about it! We are looking for the most charming, inspiring or simply funniest blogs to get us all excited here at Handpicked.

Last years Cosmopolitan Blog Awards had over 15,000 entries and when the winners were announced the Awards became one of the top trending topics on Twitter.

We think this will be even more popular this year so get your entry in early. Here are the categories where Cosmo are looking for talented writers, skilful photographers, and blogs that engage and impress – and it’s open to bloggers to either nominate themselves or those who read blogs and have a favourite or two they’d like to nominate.

The categories for 2011 are:
• New fashion blog (less than 18 months old)
• Established fashion blog (more than 18 months old)
• New beauty blog (less than 18 months old)
• Established beauty blog (more than 18 months old)
• Health, diet and fitness
• Student blogger
• Sex and relationships
• E-tailer or brand blog
• Technology and gadgets
• Celebrity
• Maleblogger
• Lifestyle, partnered by Handpicked Media

All shortlisted entries will also be considered to join Handpicked Media so what are you waiting for?

Never before have so many bloggers been obsessed with a kitchen knife and secateurs than at our Sainsbury’s event last night. This was the first time Sainsbury’s opened their doors to bloggers and we were thrilled that it was exclusively for our Handpicked team. It was a chance for our home, design and food bloggers to mix with the lifestyle and parenting as we were lead through the perfume workshop, to smart bathrooms and immaculate bedrooms.

A Christmas in July event would not be complete without Christmas trees, mince pies and gifts under the tree, with the rain pouring down outside we were actually writing our Christmas lists in our heads. Nice to meet some HP newbies; Emily from Atticus & Finch, Pippa from Pippa Jameson Interiors and Kate from Your Home is Lovely amongst the teal and aubergine cast iron casserole dishes.

Me and Mine was taking orders from The Women’s Room for a bulk order of the shears for us all, in fact I think I saw a tweet from the Forever 21 party..

“Highlights of tonight, knives and shears at Sainsburys and meat and roller-skates at Forever 21 .” > Can’t say fairer than that!

To see what everyone thought check the tweets for #SainsburysHome

Handpicked Media bloggers had a chance to take an exclusive look at the new Aveda Hair and Beauty collections for Summer this week at the Penthouse Suite of the Soho Hotel. Rumours are that P Diddy was staying in that same room earlier in the week…

Our Style bloggers had a chance to take a peek at Aveda’s latest products as well as receiving a complimentary Aveda blowdry – check out ReallyRee‘s luscious locks above.

Thanks very much to Aveda for the brilliant event, we’ve never seen such a perfectly coiffed group!

Glossy magazines, Company and Cosmopolitan have teamed up  with Handpicked Media and Max Factor make-up artist Caroline Barnes to create this summer’s hottest looks for make-up.

Starting with this month in both Cosmo and Company Lina from Makeuptomakeout, May from Maylovesmakeup and Nicola from NicolaVC86 feature creating their own looks using the latest Max Factor colours and lots of inspiration from Caroline.

Look out for other Handpicked members in the next two issues of the magazines where they will be featured creating other looks that are strong on colour and on trend for summer ’11!

Not that we’re complaining – here at Handpicked we could eat mince-pies all year round if we’re honest, and all this Christmas focus gets us in the mood for our own Handpicked Media/Sainsbury’s exclusive event on July 20th. Sainsbury’s has an incredible online offering that isn’t just about food, and as part of their Christmas in July event they’re holding a special evening just for us and our members. So we’ll be bringing you updates on this fabulous evening later in the month and do hope to see many of our publishers over a glass of mulled wine or two… (or something colder if things hot up again).

Today’s Christmas events on our list include Tesco, Waitrose and Microsoft – all thinking baubles and snow. So far we’ve had a warm welcome at Tesco who are keeping things either simple and elegant or rustic and rural - take your pick. Look out for further Christmas in July updates as we get them in!

Love this story that was in the Zen Newsletter this week it’s a very inspirational read for all you aspiring tech geeks out there. Not only will you be saving your skin from the damages of the sun by staying in a dark room you might just be coming up with a million dollar idea so as long as you are not creating havoc with a new virus, keep plugging away! Now if only I could get my Blackberry to upload my images into twitter…

He looks like an ordinary commuter on his way to work. But as Iain Dodsworth leaves his modest house in the Home Counties, he has more to smile about than most. The 36-year-old father of two has become an overnight millionaire after selling his tiny company to Twitter for £25million. His success is down to a piece of computer software he created at home while unemployed called TweetDeck, which manages your social networking universe by organising messages from groups of people into handy columns. Mr Dodsworth, who lives in Crowborough, East Sussex, founded his company three years ago.

It made a small profit for the first time last year. More than 20 million people have downloaded TweetDeck and posts from the service account for 10 per cent of Twitter’s messages. Mr Dodsworth refused to charge for downloading TweetDeck or to allow banner advertising on his Web site. But his invention’s popularity and the risk of a rival dot-com company buying it attracted Twitter’s interest. Iain, a computer programmer, said: “Twitter is great, but there is such a flood of messages. I wanted a way to filter just the people I really want to hear from, but stay subscribed to people I might want to read occasionally”.

TweetDeck has grown, with the help of investors, from a one-man band to a team of 15 with offices in East London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’, the area in Old Street that is home to dozens of hi-tech firms and has been spotlighted by David Cameron as the heart of a new ‘tech city’.

Read more on the BBC site here.

It was lovely to see so many of the Handpicked Media collective turn out last night for drinks and nibbles made even better by our hosts, the friendly and welcoming team at Flat Planet. If you haven’t checked out this fairly new kid on the block in terms of eateries in the Carnaby Street area then it’s well worth a visit. Their speciality is flatbread with a wide variety of healthy and fresh toppings and their ambience is chill-out and meet up – so they welcome you to drop by for meetings of your own, to work quietly or even tinkle away at the piano in the basement sitting area.

It was great to see some new faces to Handpicked as well as some of our old friends too – and we hope to see many more new faces at our next meeting after summer.

Our meet-ups are there for Handpicked members to swap stories, exchange experiences and above all have a night out and a glass of wine in great surroundings and get to meet the Handpicked team. We are always happy to meet our members and evenings like this make us realise how lucky we are to have so many great people on-board. We do realise that it’s difficult for members, especially those with childcare commitments or those who don’t live in London to attend but members are always welcome so we hope to see even more of you at our next one so keep an eye out for the invitation.

Last night we celebrated Talk PR‘s 10th Birthday with, and we hope this is going to become a trend, ice cream and champagne at M&C Saatchi.

It was great to catch up with our friends at Talk and to hear CEO Jane Boardman talk about the company’s history and future – here’s to another 10 years!

20 gorgeous new nail colours from Boots No.7, bottles of pink fizz, enough delicious food and as many M&M’s as you could eat all made for a wonderful night-in for a collection of our beauty bloggers last night. Along with being spoilt rotten we were treated to a nail technique demonstration by one of the best nail artists in the business, Jamie Nunn. Armed with a bag of tools and additional bits of sparkle, we painted, stippled, created amazing suede effects, marbled and added jewels, stripes and spots all under the helpful and encouraging eye of Jamie.

We were also treated to a preview of a set of nails he’s been creating for the next Lady GaGa video. We can’t give too much away here as to the theme as it’s all a bit hush-hush but as you can see they feature lots of Swarovski sparkle!

Handpicked Media bloggers had the pleasure of welcoming cosmetics expert Paula Begoun to London this week as she began a whirlwind press tour to promote her best-selling book ‘Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me’ as well as her fab skincare line Paula’s Choice.

Paula took time out of her schedule to spend an evening with Handpicked Media Beauty bloggers to discuss everything from skincare and cosmetics to diet, myths and facts.

We had a brilliant night listening to Paula wax lyrical on the cosmetics industry and I think we were all a bit shocked when we realised two hours had passed!

Luckily all of our bloggers got to go home with the latest edition of ‘Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me‘ as well a personalised selection of Paula’s Choice products.

A huge thank you to Paula and her team for such an informative event!

Last night, Marks & Spencer unveiled their latest Beauty collections exclusively to Handpicked Media in their first-ever bloggers event for the brand.

The room was buzzing with bloggers who had a chance to take a look at the stunning Golden Goddess collection as well as the latest offerings from Marks & Spencer skincare and spa.

We also had a chance to sip cocktails and nibble on canapees as we took a look at the Marks & Spencer A/W 2011 collection  – we love this fuzzy jacket on ReallyRee!

All in all, a fabulous night of makeup and fashion and a brilliant intro to Handpicked Media events!

We were thrilled to hear HeyuGuys on Lauren Lavern’s morning radio show today on Radio 6!

Lauren talked to John Lyus, who co-founded the site with Dave Sztypuljak just two and a half years ago on how they have gone from passionate 80’s movie geeks to being flown to Cannes and having film directors approach them on the red carpet!

Jon gives great advice to budding film bloggers and tells of how they are getting behind one of their favourite movies, Attack the Block

Click here to listen to the interview!

As you can see – two of our staff are going to be *very* busy this weekend so we thought we’d wait til they’re done before resuming usual service here at Handpicked.

We’ll be back in the office bright and early on Tuesday morning (03/05/11).

Have a good weekend!

From the transformational impact of on demand mobile content and the maturation of smart phone and tablet technologies to the emergent opportunities in expanding global territories and the rise of connected TV platforms, the Changing Media Summit will provide you with a blueprint for success in an increasingly tumultuous digital world.

Follow @GuardianCMS2011 for all the news as it happens!

Click to enlarge!

Huge thanks to all the bloggers who took part:

Alex Loves – http://www.alexloves.com/
Beauty And The Dirt – http://www.beautyandthedirt.com/
Coco’s Tea Party – http://www.cocosteaparty.com/
Disneyrollergirl – http://www.disneyrollergirl.net/
SCforM – http://www.scform.com/
British Beauty Blogger – http://www.britishbeautyblogger.com/
Miss Malcontent – http://www.missmalcontent.blogspot.com/
Style My Wardrobe – http://stylemywardrobe.com/
The Makeup Mole – http://www.makeupmole.com/
Vex in the City – http://www.vexinthecity.com/

16th February marked the 2011 Fashion 2.0 Awards – Celebrating The Best In Fashion, Tech and Social Media as voted by peers and fans. Interesting to note which brands have fully embraced social media and we’re delighted to see that DKNY has taken away 4 awards including Top Innovator!

Best Online Video: Bluefly Closet Confessions

Best Twitter: @DKNY

Best Facebook Page: Levi’s

Best Mobile App: DKNY Cozy

Best Blog: DKNY Times

Best Website: Armani Jeans “The Room”

Next Big Thing in Tech: Tumblr

Top Innovator: DKNY

About Fashion 2.0 Awards: Presented by Style Coalition, every year the Fashion 2.0 Awards recognize the most innovative fashion designers and brands for excellence in online communications, social media and new technologies. Created in 2010 by Style Coalition’s founder Yuli Ziv, The Fashion 2.0 Awards are now the leading awards in the online fashion industry. The 2011 Fashion 2.0 Awards were sponsored by TheFind. More info: http://stylecoalition.com/Work/Awards

Last night, Handpicked Media bloggers came together for an ultra-glam Black ‘n’ Blog evening in conjunction with Dove Invisible Dry and Sure Crystal Clear. Held at the exclusive Milk and Honey club, our Handpicked bloggers spent an evening sipping on black cocktails, chatting to a celebrity stylist (who sent everybody home with a specially chosen piece of jewellry) and taking part in a Luxe Lotto! The prizes? A Swarovski Ring and a Vivienne Westwood Bag and Dress.

A huge congratulations to the night’s winners and thank you to our gracious hosts. Even after 2 hours of mingling and drinking, there wasn’t a white patch in sight on our incredibly fresh, all-black clad bloggers!

From fashion illustration to photography, digital photography and fashion film, to web publishing and what the future might hold, two eminent industry insiders share their thoughts.

The Q&A starts at 6.30pm and will go on for about an hour – no need to book but it’s probably a good idea to get there early. We’ll see you there!

Thursday 3rd February: Apple Store, Covent Garden (1, The Piazza, WC2).

Handpicked Media is pleased to announce that brilliant movie blog Hey U Guys has been nominated for the 2011 Best Movie Blog award by Sky Movies! Congratulations to the folks at Hey U Guys and we have our fingers crossed for the win! You can vote for Hey U Guys here.

Click here to learn more about Hey U Guys.

The Handpicked Media bloggers event at the Aveda Concept Store in High Holborn

We had a great beauty event at Aveda this week and we couldn’t resist popping this picture up to show you what ‘hard’ work it is being a beauty blogger!

It’s the worst time for us girls to try look well groomed and polished, nobody likes that misty rain that just seems to make an umbrella powerless and turns our silky locks into a frizzy mess. We are putting Aveda’s Smooth Infusion range to the test, and the first step was an individual consultation with an Aveda stylist to talk us all through the products in the range. The challenge is doing it all ourselves at home, we will keep you posted!

Thanks to Aveda for hosting such a fantastic event at their salon in High Holborn, we really didn’t want to leave.

OFT

An announcement was made on Monday that we were under investigation by the OFT, we want to just to clarify the outcome with you all, to clear up any misleading reports that have since been posted. We were involved in a campaign earlier in the year that involved twitter promotion that resulted in consumers complaining about a fashion sale. No rules were in place at that time about promotion on twitter, which then led to a thorough investigation.

We are the most popular blogging network in the UK, and were very happy to be dealing with the Office of Fair Trading to shed some clarity on how blogs deal with sponsored posts and twitter. Over the last six months we have been working closely with them to set the standard in terms of sponsored posts and the use of social media to promote them. Any sponsored blog post organised through Handpicked Media carries a clear ‘Sponsored Post’  flag so there is total transparency that it has been paid-for. We are happy to lead the way  in terms of professional behaviour online and hope that others will follow our example.

The OFT has said, “Handpicked Media cooperated with the OFT throughout the investigation.” The case has been closed and the OFT were satisfied that we have been complying with their standards since the one campaign that they felt was not clearly marked.

Handpicked Media has been featured in a fantastic article written by Paul Armstrong for PR Week! Huge thanks to Paul, the Handpicked team and, of course, our Handpicked bloggers!

Keep an eye on the smart cookies over at Handpicked Media (1.5m uniques in UK – HPM), they are doing interesting things with big brands and their independent blog collective. Recently snagging both Babyliss and Olay as clients (both working with bloggers for the first time) to create sponsored blog posts with a difference – namely mixing UGC and generally taking a more integrated/holistic approach to meet business objectives. Members become an integral part of the campaign/brand rather than simple executers on a list by leveraging their entire networks and having long-term engagement with readers in a variety of ways rather than a simple hit ‘em and run strategy.

Read the full article here.

Handpicked Media is pleased to announce that Handpicked blogger Jess Contomichalos of That’s Yummy Mummy has been shortlisted for the Crown Innovator of the Year award at this year’s Crown Interior Stylist of the Year Awards.

Congratulations Jess, best of luck from everyone at Handpicked!

The winners will be announced from 7pm at the annual Crown Paints Press Launch at Chiltern Street Studio, 78b Chiltern Street, London, W1U.

The Handpicked gang had a brilliant time last night with Monty PR and the oh-so-stylish Marcia Kilgore celebrating her latest line of footwear for FitFlops. Our bloggers had a great night browsing the vast array of gorgeous yet unbelievably comfortable footwear on show as well as having their feet scanned to demonstrate how FitFlops work.

All the bloggers in attendance left with cozy FitFlop Mukluk boots which were promptly slipped on for a night pounding the pavement in the midst of the tube strike! FitFlop, our warm toes thank you!

To read more about FitFlops, take a look at the Handpicked Media blogger coverage by Fashion Foie Gras and Found, Beautiful.

Handpicked Media is pleased to say that we’ve been featured in The Independent Online today in a list of the ‘blogs which we think defy [Andrew] Marr’s assessment of drunken rantings, and offer up a unique or interesting perspective which adds to modern day journalism rather than takes from it.’

A special congratulations to our wonderful bloggers Beauty Woo Me, Bargainista Fashionista, Ms Marmite Lover and Womb for Improvement for being selected as amongst the highlights of our collective! You can read the full article here.

When Olay asked British women whether ‘beauty companies listen to your views?’, a whopping 92% of those questioned said ‘No’.

In launching their Big British Beauty Poll, Olay are giving the public a chance to have their say in all things beauty-related. What’s more, they’ve partnered with Handpicked Media in order to spread the message in their first ever outing with Social Media!

We loved finding out who our Handpicked Media beauty bloggers consider to be beauty icons – one of the questions in the poll! This is your chance to have a say in how the beauty industry works, our beauty bloggers already have! Be sure to take the poll here and have your opinions heard.

Adam & Eve

Planning a Handpicked meet-up takes dedication, determination and a venue that’s not too far off the beaten track but gives us space to mix and mingle for a couple of hours. So we were delighted when The Adam and Eve, Wells Street (just off Oxford Street) offered to host our September event. They couldn’t have been more welcoming providing waiter service and an impressive selection of nibbles to keep everyone happy (even fresh British oysters as there was an ‘R’ in the month). It was definitely the end of summer  and few of us took advantage of the tables out the back in a pedestrianised alleyway tending to stick to the comfort of the interior. So when you’re next in Oxford Street and want a friendly place with great food for lunch then check it out…

Our meet-ups are there for bloggers and niche website owners to meet and swap news and views, and to meet new members. Our own newbie team member Lauren, who has come on board as Sales Manager, was also present to say ‘hello’ and meet some of the collective. We realise that it’s not possible for everyone to make these monthly meetings but members are always welcome, so hope to see as many Handpicked Media members as possible at the next one in October.

After dominating the Cosmo Blog Awards with 11 nominations , we were looking forward to awards day – and we weren’t disppointed! A huge congratulations to Lollipop26Writes for her ‘Best Beauty’ win and new Handpicked blogger Diary of a Vintage Girl for scooping up the ‘Female Lifestyle’ prize!

One thing’s for certain, Cosmo readers can spot a good blog!

You can visit Sartorial Male here!

Handpicked Media has been offered an interview opportunity with Karren Brady, Lord Alan Sugar’s new right hand woman on The Apprentice, and we wanted to get you all involved by submitting your own questions to her!

Karren has just signed on as a mentoring role for back-to-work mums for Avon, as they try to inspire mothers on how to juggle family and business life and how to achieve their goals. She’s been a football club MD and is now on the Apprentice so will surely have a lot of information and advice for any parent who’s looking into how to juggle parenting life with work life so will be a great interviewee!

The questions will form an article on Beautyandthedirt.com and will link to your blogs/twitter pages so should be mutually beneficial as well as well-rounded and informative.

All you have to do is email Emma at emma@beautyandthedirt.com with your questions and she’ll collate the best ones into an interview format and send them off for Karren to answer.

Once the piece is live you’ll be more than welcome to pull the interview for your own sites as long as you accredit everyone in the same way as the original article.

IMPORTANT: Emma has to have this done by Thursday 18^th (tomorrow) at 12 noon so if you’ve got some questions please do get them to her asap.

We’re very proud to report that at the beginning of September, 3 of the UK’s best-known mummy bloggers, MummyTips, Sleep is for the Weak and Nixdminx will be visiting Save the Children’s inspirational projects in Bangladesh.

Every year almost 9 million children under the age of five die, most of them from preventable things like diarrhoea. We can change that. Passionate about our work and ready to flex their multimedia skills to campaign for change, our bloggers are going to be tweeting, creating video and photo galleries and writing about their experiences live and direct from Bangladesh.

This is a fantastic opportunity to show how blogs can become a platform for real and important change in the world. You can do your part to help by following their blogs, retweeting their #blogladesh tweets and signing the petition on the Save the Children website.

Good luck, ladies!

Margarita Monday was put firmly on the social calender with a little help from our friends at Sauza Fresh Tequila and the always welcoming team at The Player.

It gave us the perfect opportunity to welcome in some newbies to the collective including Ruth (A Model Recommends), Clair (The Urban Woo), Marcelle (Creative Head), Katie Chutzpah and Helen (Beauty Scribbler) – it was lovely to see them. John Buchan from I-Spy Marketing gave a riveting (no, really) talk on SEO – it was only meant to last 15 minutes but the questions from the floor were still coming thick and fast after 40 minutes! And we all suffered from a bit of ‘tech-envy’ when Peter from Harden’s was spotted in a corner playing with his i-pad – cool or what?

Bringing Up Charlie

Here are the categories that our Handpicked Finalists are nominated in for The 2010 MAD Blog Awards!
There is a month to vote, so show your support for all their hard work and Vote here.

The Butlins MAD Blogger of the Year

Bringing Up Charlie

Most Innovative MAD Blog

Cafe Bebe

Funniest MAD  Blog

Are we nearly there yet, Mummy

Best Looking MAD Blogs

Metropolitan Mum

It’s a Mummy’s Life

Best new MAD Blog

Single Slummy Mummy

Best MAD Blog photography

Sticky Fingers

Best MAD Blog writer

Bringing Up Charlie

We’re thrilled to see so many of our Handpicked blogs amongst the finalists in the first ever Mummy and Daddy (MAD) Blog Awards, celebrating the utter brilliance of British parent blogs.

No.7 event for Handpicked @ Aqua Nueva

Last night we celebrated the 1st Anniversary of Boots No7 Protect & Perfect Intense Beauty Serum at the super swanky Aqua Nueva in W1.

Our beauty bloggers attended an exclusive event and got to sample the new intensive version of the cult Protect & Perfect Beauty Serum. We also got to see the new Summer Limited Edition range AND a sneak peak of the new, Lisa Eldridge-designed Decades Collection that marks 75 years of No.7.

No.7 Event for Handpicked Media - the Nibbles!

So, whilst sipping champagne and eating ridiculously yummy nibbles on our private roof-top terrace, we got a-sifting to find out some of the stand out products.

The Player, Soho

We swapped the chocolate for Bellini’s and food platters post-Easter at The Player in Broadwick Street, London W1 and welcomed some new faces to the Handpicked Media family in the shape of Alyson (thatsnotmyage), Nick (The Arts Now), Sara (London Beauty Review), Kaz (stylemywardrobe) and Stephanie (Notes From Inside My Head). Keeping the cocktails on tap meant that we spent, ooohhh, minutes on the subject of google analytics. It also gave us a  chance to update you on our activity and get your thoughts on Handpicked and blogging in general. The next meet up will be back at The Player on Monday 17th May (watch out for your invitation) and the brief discussion topic will be search engine optimisation – make sure you make it!

Ape to Gentleman

Last night we attended the P&G beauty awards, the one that we most look forward to as it honours beauty journalists, hair and make up artists. Lychee and Guava cocktails on arrival were a big hit with us too!

Rick Edwards was a great choice of host and kept things moving and funny. Loved the Jay Maskrey awards, bling-tastic! We were happy to see a Best Blog Category but did we blink and miss the best online category, there was one last year?

The interesting and inspiring choice of judging panel were judging from printed copies of articles, without a laptop in sight. However we were thrilled to see Grooming Guru and Lollipop 26 shortlisted in this category and eventual winner was our very own Lollipop 26. The Exfoliator, Ahmed won an award for an article in Attitude Magazine, so a good night for our Handpicked Collective.

We do think the award for best dressed should go to the Ape to Gentleman duo, who wouldn’t have looked out of place on the red carpet of the Oscars. Raw silk bowties, standards have been set TheChicGeek.!