Why?
Groups of Birmingham Bloggers have been meeting in a kinda formal/informal way for a few months now. Mostly orgainised around the Facebook group, which has worked — up to a point.
Facebook is sort of broken at the moment (for this sort of thing, for this group) because:
- Lots of us are not using FB so much anymore, as we spend so much time on twitter. Twitter’s great for ad-hoc meetings, but not good for organising event events.
- We can’t make anymore people group admins — which is nice for the de-centrist non-hierarchical way we want to be.
I (me, Jon) resisted a website for the group because I thought that it wasn’t as democratic as using FB, but talking to Andy Mabbett and Stef Lewandowski (amongst others) at the meet-up in the Prince last night I realised I was being a bit odd. So, any Brum (or nearby) Blogger is welcome to admin rights to this site. dm me on twitter/email with email address for your very own account.
So why Paradise Circus? Well, since the very beginning of meeting up we’ve not been happy with the “Birmingham Bloggers” term. Some thought that it excluded other with not-so-much blogging social media activities (podcasters, heavy flickr users, tweeters, and so on), Birmingham is a little odd as a term too as most people don’t blog about brum (and there are a few wider WM attendees), and Danny Smith hated the word blogger.
Yeah, but why Paradise Circus? It’s nice, it sounds like a lovely and lively mess of things happening, it radiates democratic love, it’s uptopian, it’s a lovely big road island, it’s a Lilac Time album. And if/when the council (with architectural vandalism aforethought) knock the current building (pictured left) down we might be able to flog the URL to new corporate owners…
Site is totally unfinished, comments, suggestions (page with free wifi map on?), help, more posts… well, join up and get going.
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Paradise Circus — a place for Brum Bloggers (an their ilk)…
It’s an island of love and friendship for Brum-ish blogging, web and social media types….
That’s “Mabbett”; with two “T”s.
Nice work, nonetheless!
Oops, sorry Andy, duly corrected. I blame the general anesthetic, first website I’ve ever designed during the after affects of an op.
Instantly loving the name and the motivation!
Would be cool to have a directory or some profile pages where peeps can list themselves, perhaps part of a forum — Paradise forum? (no, that wasn’t an intentional lead up!)
well it’s not necessarily the term bloggers that i had a problem with, although it is an ugly antiquated phrase, it was “Birmingham” that i had the bigger problem with.
aww screw it i feel a post coming on
Hmm, might be good – all users get a profile page with their website, a bio they write and their posts (eg http://www.paradisecircus.com/author/admin/), is that kind of enough?
Forum, possibly – I’m pretty much out of MySQL on my server, but if someone could put one together we could have at a subdomain.