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...

There are fewer moments in life that have given me as much pleasure as writing the first story on TechDigest. Not that the post was groundbreaking journalism, a contender for the Pulitzer prize or even completely free of typos (ouhc!). It was just that after years of wrestling with HTML codes and invariably giving up, I'd found a foolproof way of realising one of my big ambitions - to launch a gadgets website.

That was almost five years ago, and although Shiny Media didn't really follow for a few years later, the blog that kicked off one of the the UK's leading commercial blogging networks was born.