Imagine my surprise when sifting through the mail yesterday I spotted some invites from the Palace (Buckingham Palace that is, not Crystal Palace). Turns out that the Shiny Media founders have all been invited to the re-launch of Her Maj's website, www.royal.gov.uk on February 12th at Buck House itself. She is going to be there too so maybe we can ask her about who she's been poking on Facebook and her favourite Lolcats pictures. Maybe she'll be live tweeting it too! Then again...

After nearly two years at Stukeley Street, Shiny Media is on the move. But don't fear we aren't moving that far, just round the corner to Shaftesbury Avenue, closer to China Town. (And don't worry you haven't seen the last of the distinctive red flock wallpaper).

Our new address from January 2nd 2009 will be:

Shiny Media
4th Floor,
130 Shaftesbury Ave
London
W1D 5EU
UK

Tel: (020) 7031 4300
Fax: (020) 7031 4302

(Direct dials to follow)

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).

Thanks to the Evening Standard for naming Shiny Media's founders - Chris Price, Katie Lee and Ashley Norris - among London's most influential people. OK I'm not entirely sure what exactly that means (oh to be able to influence world events right now)  but I do know that it was a brilliant star studded event last night with everyone from Gok Wan to Boris Johnson showing up at the Wallace Collection. If you want to see the full list of London's Most Influential People featured in 'little black book'  then you can buy a copy of the Evening Standard today. You can also read the kind words that the Evening Standard wrote about Shiny after the jump.

Great piece in Guardian.co.uk in which our very own Gemma talks about how how attitudes are changing towards bloggers especially those covering big fashion events such as New York Fashion Week.

She says: "I've seen a lot of changes in the last few years. When I first started out, nobody knew what a blog was and I was barely given the time of day. Now I'm very lucky that I get a lot of the same opportunities as mainstream press."

"You only have to look at the number of newspapers and magazines that now have fashion blogs to see how everyone is realising the potential of something so urgent and fast," she adds.

We founded Shiny Media as three freelance journalists back in 2004 and the sites were born out of a passion for the internet and a belief that established publishers just weren't making enough of the medium. The early sites were launched because we loved blogs, we wanted to write about things that interested us, and we couldn't find sites like Shoewawa and Shiny Shiny to write for.

So we created those sites ourselves, and we quickly realised that we were on to something. We'd never set up a publishing company before, and there wasn't a UK blogging business template we could follow, so a lot of what we've built up has been learned along the way.

And we've certainly learned a lot since those early days of freelance. We now have a whole team of writers (eleven in house and many more freelance), some of whom have been with us since the very beginning. Fashion journalist and blogger Gemma Cartwright joined us back in November 2004 to start Shoewawa and The Bag Lady and now heads up our entire fashion team, bringing her own successful site, Catwalk Queen, with her. More recently, we have hired two more staff members this month, including Duncan, a staff writer on our oldest and biggest blog Tech Digest and Matt who joins us as an account manager, supporting our growing commercial team.

Revenue is going up month on month and traffic has increased 26 per cent over the last 12 months. So it seems 'rumours of our death' to paraphrase Mark Twain have been greatly exaggerated.

We read the article on Tech Crunch UK and the many comments below the feature and we thought we should respond to them here.

Thanks to Nigel's Eco Store for awarding Hippyshopper third place in the eco blogs and news sites category in its Green Web Awards.

To finish just behind Tree Hugger and the Guardian's Environment pages in such a fiercely competitive category is a real achievement especially when it's voted on by other bloggers and social media users. So well done Abi. Keep up the good work.