Before you’ve even seen the fizzy drink company’s latest effort, you could make an educated guess at who might appear in it: Messi would be the obvious choice, and Drogba, Torres and Aguero — who all star in the ad along with the Barcelona prodigy — would feature high up the list. Similarly, WARC’s forecast, which predicts 13 markets’ adspend growth for the year, contains a few predictable appearances of its own.

China, Russia and India’s fast-growing economies means that you could confidently suggest that they might achieve the highest adspend growth in 2012, which is what WARC’s forecast also predicts at 14.8, 13.6 and 11.4 per cent respectively. The UK, languishing near the bottom of the table with just 2.4 per cent, comes across more Jack Wilshere than Christiano Ronaldo. Incidentally, the Arsenal midfielder is one of the footballers representing our nation in Pepsi’s football-focused ad.

However, it would be churlish to criticize the UK’s advertising market based solely on WARC’s latest adspend figures — after all, growth is not to be sniffed at as Spain will attest — and there is evidence out there to suggest that not only is creativity still abundant in television advertising, but especially so on digital media platforms, which are truly something for advertising and commercial producers to get excited about. Mobile web usage has soared in recent years, and the IAP/PWC Mobile Adspend Report, published in March, valued mobile advertising to be worth £203.2m in the UK last year, representing a 157 per cent year-on-year increase in mobile advertising budgets.

Online advertising presents similar potential for advertisers. The Drum, a media and marketing blog, noted how recent IAB data suggests that UK online display advertising spend has surpassed £1bn after a 13.4 per cent growth in 2011, while total Internet ad spend grew 14.4 per cent to £4.8bn, up £687m year on year. Strategy Analytics predicts that online ad spending is also set to rise due to the impending Olympic Games, growing to 10.6 per cent in the UK in 2012, reports Equimedia.

One only needs to look at commercial production companies and directors like Moon, TBWA London, Sumo Science and Bartle Bogle Hegarty for a reason to be positive about the UK ad industry. The latter produced the Guardian’s recent ad The Whole Picture, which set tongues wagging due to its slick production values and confidently self-assured message. It felt more like an advert for a Charlie Brooker special than a newspaper, which can only mean two things: it was impeccably produced and demanded your attention throughout.

Perhaps growth isn’t everything, and it’s possible that the UK will see a modest increase this year because the industry is in such rude health as it is. Once it is evident that the creativity, the flair and the passion has all but vapourised from our nation’s steamy hotbed of advertising talent, there will be a cause for worry, though reassuringly it doesn’t look like that will be the case any time soon.

My online magazine National Scribbler will also be closing. Although I’ve been lucky in the way that I’ve been able to devote lots of time to maintaining them this year, managing two sites has become increasingly impractical. I don’t want to abandon running a website altogether, so I may start up a new one in the future, but at the moment I have to focus on finding a job. I hope that one day, when I’m settled into a journalism job or career, I’ll have the time to start one up again.

London-based multimedia producer, lecturer and blogger Adam Westbrook is somebody who believes that powerful content should be afforded the visual impact it deserves. His new ebook, Inside The Story: a masterclass in digital storytelling by the people who do it best, is a beautiful 45-page PDF that aims to help people improve their digital storytelling and writing abilities in order to stand out in today’s overcrowded journalistic landscape.

Each page in the book features an artistically vibrant, unique nugget of wisdom contributed by a prominent name in the media, all of which are listed on the contents page. It’s an impressively eclectic mix, featuring names like The New York Times’s multimedia editor and Emmy-award winner Andrew DeVigal, the Guardian’s multimedia photographer Felix Clay, and director Claudio Von Planta.

Westbrook wrote the book in four months — time which, he writes on his website, mostly consisted of sending emails — and while some inclusions are much shorter in length than others, you never feel like any of them were added randomly or without specific purpose. In some cases a particular author’s use of brevity, making their entry consist of fewer than 15 words, results in more food for thought than another who had opted to fill the entire page.

Whether or not it will transform the legions of inspired storytellers out there into Goldsmith-award winners remains to be seen, but at the very least it will provide them with some useful tips, thought-provoking sentiments and oodles of inspiration. At just £3.50 it’s the same price as a pint, and all of the proceeds will be going to Kiva, a developing-world entrepreneurship charity.

You can purchase it here.

I’m not overweight, but 2011 saw me slip — quite happily, it should be added — back into student mode. Weight gain was inevitable — you can only consume so much alcohol and junk food before you begin piling on the pounds, but I did make a valiant effort at keeping it under control by joining the university gym in March last year.

From the off, the aim was to get fit enough to run a half marathon due to take place in May that year. I paid the entry fee, wrote an initial blog post for my postgraduate course newspaper detailing my excitement for getting back into running, and went into full-on self-congratulatory mode. I was actually going to be healthy for the first time in two years.

Unfortunately, it was on day 14 of my new training program that my left knee made a horrible grinding sound accompanied by a shooting pain that felt like a chisel had been mercilessly driven through my kneecap. I’ve always been more of a long-distance runner as opposed to a sprinter — running daily at 14MPH for two consecutive weeks had been overkill for my overexerted, traumatised joints.

Several trips to Leeds General Infirmary confirmed what I didn’t want to know: a quick recovery was off the cards, as was an x-ray. I was told to simply ‘do stretches’ to strengthen the muscle above my injured knee. I found this incredibly frustrating and was determined to somehow continue exercising. After 10 minutes of jogging, the shooting pain returned, and it was just as bad on an elliptical cross trainer. The pain was even more intense on an exercise bike.

By the time October arrived, I had convinced myself that I was truly resigned to my fate; my irreparable knee was destined for the scrapheap, and surgery or cortisone injections were going to be the only options left after I had finished my NCTJ exams. Between then and Christmas, I forgot all about exercising. I graduated, left Leeds and settled back at home.

One day in December, not having a lot to do, I stepped back onto the scales out of curiosity. They read 11 stone, a weight I hadn’t been since eating an almost record number of pizzas as an 18-year-old university fresher. It had been around three-and-a-half months since I last attempted a jog on a treadmill and eight months since the original injury. I decided to go for it and hopped on the treadmill to jog a short distance (extremely tentatively — and slowly, with no incline). It’s an odd feeling jogging on a treadmill expecting your knee to collapse at any given moment. Unbelievably though, after 40 minutes, it didn’t.

I refused to believe that I was actually back to normal until I had been jogging every week for around a month-and-a-half. Instead of running at full pelt, I’ve kept the speed low ever since to avoid re-injury. I now jog at just 7MPH but compensate for the lack of speed by raising the incline to seven or 10 percent. On average I’ve jogged around three days a week since February, for an hour every morning, and have managed to get myself back down to 10.5 stone (a seven pound loss is, according to the Daily Mail, the most satisfying weight-loss achievement there is).

I’ve signed up to the Hull 10k, my first in three years, which takes place in early June. I’m also looking to participate in the York 10k in August. The Yorkshire 3 Peaks Challenge is also shaping up to be an attractive warm down, too (I say this having never attempted one).

The above is basically my attempt at justifying my incessant bleating about jogging, and I’ll probably be doing a whole lot more of it before I reach my goal of 10 stone by May. But then, social media is equally for patting yourself on the back as it is communicating with others, so I’m not too bothered.

It is worth mentioning that I’m also enjoying jogging more this year because I’ve acquired several playlists’ worth of electronic music remixes through recommendations by fellow users of  the excellent music website plug.dj. If you’re stuck for something to listen to while on the treadmill, ask people on there.

Nobody enjoys listening to nothing but their own thoughts for an hour while working up a sweat — I know I definitely don’t.

I first attended one of Trinity’s Journalism Weeks last year when I started my NCTJ journalism course. The speakers were great back then, and there was a refreshing air of optimism regarding the future of journalism — not only from The Media Briefing’s Patrick Smith, who highlighted the advantages of specialising, and Media Standards Trust director Martin Moore — but also from Joanna Geary, who is now at the Guardian. I hoped that I would be able to deliver my own presentation at a Journalism Week at the future, talking about some high-flying journalism project I’m involved in (or any project for that matter).

I’m not quite there yet, but I did end up talking to around 10 or so students about setting up a small website-slash-portfolio. I’ve already posted an article on here outlining how to set up a WordPress-hosted blog, which is undoubtedly the quicker and simpler option if you’re only after setting up a basic top-down blog. However, I wanted to demonstrate, from scratch, the process of setting up a self-hosted three-column WordPress site — starting with choosing a hosting provider and setting up MySQL databases before moving onto customisation and plug-ins.

I must admit that if I was watching the presentation as my 18-year-old self, I would’ve struggled to understand what was going on, which is why I included a comprehensive guide, with screenshots, detailing every step I was going through. If you’d like to give it a go yourself, click on this link to view the presentation guide. It’s not going away any time soon, so hopefully it’ll come in handy for a few of you out there.

I’m not quite sure where in the country I’ll be working next year, but I’ll certainly take a look at the line-up to see who’s been asked to share their pearls of wisdom.

Setting up your blog

1. Go to WordPress.com
2. Click ‘Get started here’

3. Enter your blog address, pick a username, password and enter your email address.
4. Click ‘Create Blog’ under the free column.

5. Enter your first name, last name, and a short bio and click ‘Save Profile’.
6. Login to the email address that you provided and click on ‘Activate Blog’.
7. It will say ‘Your blog is active’. Click on the link.

8. Go to WordPress.com and click on the WordPress logo in the top left.

9. It will show the name of your blog. Click on it (in blue) to be taken to your dashboard.

Logging into your blog

Once you have set up your blog it will be accessible from the following type of link:

http://yourchosenusername.wordpress.com/wp-admin/

Replacing ‘your chosen username’ with the username you picked. After visiting the link, enter your username and password and press enter to log in.

Adding categories

To keep your blog organised you can add categories which you can assign your blog posts to.

1. Click on posts in the left hand column

2. Click on categories

3. Under ‘Name’ type the name of your category. Click on Add New Category below.

4. Click Add New Category.

Adding a blog post

1. Click on ‘Posts’ in the left hand column

2. Click on ‘Add New’
3. Enter a title
4.Type in your article. Note that if you want to paste it in, you have to click the following box first and then paste it in or it will carry over the formatting.

Tip: If you want to delay when the post will be published, click Edit next to publish immediately and change the date.

5. Select the category you want the post to appear in.

6. Click on Publish to publish the blog post when you’re finished.

Linking within a post

1. To make a link in a post, highlight the part of the sentence that you want to link.

2. Click on the link icon (on the left below).

3. Type in the URL box the website link. Click Add link.

It will now appear linked.

Adding an image to a blog post

1. To add an image click on the first icon to the right of Upload/Insert:

2. Click on select files

3. Find and choose your image. If you’re unsure leave it on medium. Click on Insert Into Post.

Embedding video from YouTube in a  blog post

1. Go to a youtube video. Click on ‘Share’ underneath the video.

2. Click Embed

3. Click on the iframe link and copy it.

4. Go back to your post and click on the HTML tab.

Paste in the iframe link and switch back to the visual tab. After updating your post your YouTube video will be displayed.

Embedding video from SoundCloud

1. SoundCloud is more suitable for audio recordings than YouTube. After you have signed up to Soundcloud and uploaded an audio recording, click on the Share button on the top left of it.

2. Copy the iframe embed code.

3. Paste the embed code into your WordPress blog post via the HTML view and then switch back to the visual view

Changing the appearance of your blog

1. Click on Themes under appearance in the left hand column.

2. Click on Install Themes.

3. Tick the boxes of your choice of what themes you want to search for and click find themes. Make sure you have ticked ‘Fixed width’, ‘Two Columns’ and ‘Right sidebar’. Click Find Themes.

4. Once you’ve found a theme you like, click install.

Customising your theme

Some themes give you the option of changing certain aspects of the theme in the Appearance column. You’re usually allowed to change some general theme options, the background and the header. Try clicking in Header if it’s there.

If you can change the header it will tell you what size it must be in pixels.

After you have uploaded an image click save changes.

Adding widgets

A theme needs a right-hand sidebar in order to add widgets. Click on Widgets under Appearance.

Available widgets are listed on the left. Widgets currently displayed on your blog are on the right. Usually, the Primary Widget Area is the one that a theme uses, but that’s not always the case. If dragging widgets into that area doesn’t do anything, try dragging them into another Widget Area and refreshing your blog.

Clicking on the right hand arrow of a widget will open the customisation options for that widget. You can make alterations to the widget and then click the blue save button.

Finding new widgets via plug-ins

You can’t get new widgets for your blog by themselves — they come from plug-ins. Plug-ins are packages of files that let you do additional things on your blog — like display YouTube videos or your Twitter feed in widgets. Once you have installed a new plug-in, new widgets appear in the ‘Available widget area’.

In this example we’ll install a Twitter feed plug-in and then drop its widget into our sidebar.

1. Click on ‘Add New’ under Plugins in the left hand menu.

2. In the search box, type ”Twitter Only Widget” and click Search Plugins.

3. Click on Install Now. If prompted, click OK.

4. Click Activate Plugin.

5. Click on Widgets under Appearance in the left-hand menu. Drag the Twitter Only Widget from the left hand side into your first widget area on the right.

Click on the left hand arrow to the right.

6. Enter your Twitter username and how many tweets you want to display. Click save.