At the start of the year, we ran a creative sponsorship campaign with Cisco, asking people to send in videos about their home technology setup (was it "digital heaven" or "digital hell"?). The "My Video Life" campaign (see a post about it here on Tech Digest) included prizes and questionnaires, and Cisco enjoyed working with us so much that when they decided to launch the campaign in the rest of Europe, they asked us to help.

Thanks to our good relationships with European blog networks (we worked with many of them when we worked with LG last year), we were more than happy to oblige!

Ben Blog's Blog.nl and the Dutch Cowboys are all involved in the campaign, which includes the same "Digital Cribs" video competition as well as a survey offering lots of nice prizes.

Vanessa and I went over to Amsterdam to cover Cisco's Visual Networking party at the Heineken in the City Store, attended by the cream of the Dutch tech blogging community. Here's our video of a great night.

Remember The Interceptor? Treasure Hunt? Challenge Anneka? Well, Shiny Media's tech sites, Tech Digest and Shiny Shiny have joined a live Treasure Hunt that's going to be more thrilling than all three combined.

Hunt organiser, Vodafone, has got us on board to help out with giving clues and searching for the "Live Guy", who will be rushing round to most of the major cities of Great Britain, giving away Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook to anyone who can catch him.

Library House, the company founded by former Dragon's Den entrepreneur Doug Richard, has named Shiny Media as one of the hottest private media technology companies in Europe.

The 2008 MediaTech Top 100 list, in conjunction with Kemp Little and New Media Age, features Shiny Media in its 'Text and Images' category, alongside Switzerland's coComment and the UK's MoneyExpert. Other companies in the hot 100 include Shiny's e-commerce partner Pixsta (under Search and Directory) and also MyDeco - the home interiors site created by Brent Hoberman, founder of LastMinute.com.

The awards are given to tech companies likely to have the biggest impact on the industry in the future. Last month the Shiny Media founders were named among the Evening Standard's 1000 most influential Londoners. Any more accolades and it will be difficult to get our heads through the doors of Shiny towers!  

October proved a bumper month for Shiny Media's blogs with big rises across the board, particularly in the home-based lifestyle sector, perhaps reflecting people staying at home more during the economic downturn.  

Biggest rises were for craft site Crafty Crafty which reported a 40 per cent growth in uniques taking it to 89,000 and a 37 per cent rise in Coronation Street site CorrieBlog, taking it to 79,000 uniques. Other big rises were recorded for XBoxer.tv (34 per cent), US fashion site ShinyStyle.tv (28 per cent) and Kiss and Make Up (24 per cent).

Overall, the network's uniques grew by 7 per cent to reach 3.2.million and page impressions were up 6 per cent to 6.1 million (all figures Google Analytics).