Here is my piece on the Millennium Seed Bank for the Smithsonian magazine (in Washington DC).

Enjoying the Elkins book. His approach is to disassemble all of the familiar means by which we assess photography - family snaps, fine art, the sublime - and seek out what is unique to the art form. At the moment it doesn't seem to be all that much. He has pitched it as a response to Camera Lucida, which is as good a starting point as any for such a personal piece of work.

My interview with Colin Grant has gone live on The Daily Telegraph's website, as has my essay on Robert Nicol for COLE Gallery.

Read Sontag, Barthes on photography along with John Berger's Ways of Seeing (I appreciate rather late in the day). Now hoping to start on James Elkins's What Photography Is. As far as I can tell, the Barthes isn't a patch on the Sontag, but I guess it's (a) much shorter, and (b) his writing style is much less compressed. Refreshingly subjective, i.e. his feelings and emotions are a starting point for a theory on critique, which I guess I've not encountered much before.  Berger's book feels fresh. It's surprising we don't encounter more 'pop' books on aesthetics, given how popular shows in national galleries are at the moment. Maybe TV will do.

So just an update on reading: Submarine, Care of Wooden Floors, Goon Squad, The Teleportation Accident, Casino Royale, The Art of Fielding, Light Boxes, Lee Rourke on fables, The Ongoing Moment, Art Incorporated, Child 44, How To Write A Lot, various Lovecraft stories, along with a Denise Riley essay. Two classics to finish now, then some photography books I think. Reading The New Yorker a lot.

Recent commissions include those for US magazine Smithsonian, The Daily Telegraph and Museums Journal. I am also working on an essay for London's Cole Gallery, on the illustrator, painter and sculptor Robert Nicol, who has an exhibition there next month; the show is based around the life and death of John Franklin, a little-known explorer whose crew died, and cannibalised each other, during a trip to the Arctic in the 1840s.

I've been interviewing lots of former NOTW journalists for Graham Bowley's forthcoming book on Murdoch while the former is in Afghanistan. In addition, we've now got around eight interviews up on MYMZK; please follow the site on Twitter here or mail us with interview suggestions at mail@mymzk.com.

MYMZK

In around February 2010, I started looking into a project to produce a bespoke, curated, not-for-profit music website. It would be written well, in an accessible manner. Ideally I'd be interviewing people who were not making a lot of money from their work, and help promote them along the way.

I commissioned Andy Cole at EnterExit to come up with the design concept, something clean, simple and modern, with Imran Younis then building it in code from scratch. I update and manipulate the HTML with new material in Dreamweaver CS5.5, which helps keep the site as unique as I possibly can. Assuming you've not just left it, you can see the results here.

The site is fully licensed via the Performing Rights Society (PRS). Delphine Seddon at Statham, Gill and Davies has provided legal advice while Ian Kynnersley has built an iPhone app from scratch. This and an email template have been designed along Andy's guidelines, and will follow the content. The app, once operational, will allow the download of new music along with clean, easy-to-read interviews, which ideally communicate a sense of the acts' local venues and interests.

To help with writing, I've enlisted the help of various talented journalism students - whose enthusiasm is gratefully appreciated - studying on the City University journalism courses. We're looking to hear from anyone who wants to get involved, who would be interested in being spoken to, written about, or would like to write themselves. I'm happy to edit students' work, or provide feedback where needed.

Feel free to write to me here if any of that applies. If you're still not bored, some more information about me is on my website, or you can follow me on Twitter here.

So I've re-read a couple of novels from last year, seeing how they work. Read The Ask, Fiesta, The Road, alongside The Turn of the Screw, now working my way through Bleak House, hopefully moving on to the Tomalin biography afterwards, and Scott Fitzgerald's stories. Quite fancy a bit of Peter Ackroyd at some point. I re-wrote a short story about the Pamplona, well in the genre fiction zone, now working on a couple of other pieces of writing. I prepared, and then unprepared, an application for the Columbia MFA, with the feeling that I need to get better.

Trying to work along the lines of this Gary Lutz piece in The Believer on prose style. A feat in itself.

Work-wise, have had commissions from The Guardian, Esquire UK, and am helping The New York Times journalist Graham Bowley research a book. I've been commissioned to write a catalogue for Rivington Street's RED gallery, and am likely to be doing quite a lot of freelance PR for various clients. Am excited about focusing on fiction, and MYMZK (see above).

These are some of my final news stories at The Independent before I went freelance at the beginning of December (since then, I have been commissioned by Esquire, am working on MYMZK and am pursuing new opportunities).

*Story off back of leaked correspondence between Leonardo owner and Dr Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery, ahead of the gallery's major show;

*Call of Duty 3 approved by censors (followed by The Daily Mail);

*Shane Meadows lined up for Stone Roses film (followed by The Guardian, The Sun, NME, Metro, among others)

*Did Van Gogh die in unfortunate brush with fate (first journalist in the world to report; story subsequently published by hundreds of international media);

*Child visitors plummet to major museums;

*The Wallingers that were too wacky, even for him.