Paradise Circus

We Share Stuff has announced a new set of Sunday morning internet surgeries in Erdington - building on what else has been developing in Birmingham:

so put Sunday 23rd November in your diaries as the ‘We Share Stuff’ team will be at The Red Couch cafe, Erdington each Sunday morning from 11:00am to around 1:00pm. The surgery will be free to attend and the cafe itself serves a wide selection of drinks and snacks. So if you’re curious about the Internet, want to know how to get a voice online, or merely want to drop by for a chat, please do. The atmosphere is real friendly and we promise not to bombard anyone with jargon. It’s all about showing you how easy the Internet is becoming.

It’s an important reminder than no one needs any formal organisation to be able to offer this help, just somewhere warm with wifi and somebody willing to serve a hot drink or two.

Meanwhile the Birmingham Bloggers group (with space and support from BVSC & the Birmingham 3rd Sector Assembly) is running a second social media surgery for voluntary organisations and community groups from the city Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 from 5.30pm to 7.00pm at the same venue at the first one (BVSC in Digbeth - see map link here). If you came last time you are always welcome to come again. Please sign up by clicking here - just so we know how many folk may turn up.

The original surgeries run by Pete Ashton may be thinner on the ground this winter - unless of course more of us pop along to keep them going - but you can still find him at Rooty’s.

Here’s a thing that might be a cool thing for us to play with or might just fade away - one can never tell. It’s a chatbox widget called Talkinator and it can be embeded like so:

The neat thing is you can embed it in any website and the same chat will take place over all of them. This one is the Brumbloggers chatroom. If you fancy having it in your sidebar grab the code and stick it in.

The Flapper is to be demolished as part of a redevelopment and while I’m not surprised, I am bloody furious

Me and the Flapper have a chequered history; in my early teens a lot of my friends had there first gigs there, the cheap booze and out of the way nature of the place soon led it to be the perfect pre-XL’s stomping ground, and then a little later because of the rowdy circles I moved in the bar staff would phone the police if they so much as smelt our leather jackets as we swaggered past. Currently the Flapper is my secret bolt hole a quiet afternoon escape where I can take half an hour to watch the sun set over the canal.

But its not nostalgia or personal convenience driving the affront, it’s the creeping homogenisation of our city centre, a bleeding of every scrap of individuality and independent spirit, until Birmingham becomes just another yuppie temple of Mammon a bland glass pit stop on the road from London to Manchester.

We are doomed to live in a city of ubiquitous name brands. Fated to have to drink in identikit Wetherspoons or those hatful Ember Inns that are decorated in neutral coffee house banality designed not to appeal to anyone just as long as the don’t offend anyone either. Every music venue will be corporate sponsored and controlled by vacuous PR machines.

I’m not saying creativity will not survive in this atmosphere, it will. But that’s all it will be; surviving, not flourishing or growing, just a loose knit collection of people fleeing to the suburbs playing at local pubs to a handful of friends and a confused man with a dog.

The soul of any city is its culture; unfortunately this city’s soul is being sold to the redevelopment devil one “regeneration” at a time.

*written in a pub and posted with the help of the lovely bounder*

As you may know I’ve been doing some work with Digital Birmingham over the last month which has been pretty interesting on a number of levels. They come from the rigid, hierarchical City Council environment necessary to run a large city while I come from the fluid, distributed playground of social media exploration. But we have a lot in common, principally the desire to widen the use of online tools and resources across the population, so finding ways to work together has been, and I never thought I’d say this about working with a council department, a lot of fun.

While I’ve got some personal projects in the pipeline through (plug alert!) ASH-10 there’s one idea which I think is worth talking about here since I hope it’ll involve all of us.

DB are interested in putting together some kind of online handbook for social media tools - links to resources such as Wordpress.com and Twitter but, more importantly, guides on how to use them and why in the context of Birmingham. Since this wouldn’t be a small undertaking there would be funding available either through DB or from sponsorship, but DB would look after all of that.

I’d be interested in writing something like this - if nothing else it’d help me to drill down my ideas and theories into something practical - but I don’t think I could cover everything in depth. Which got me thinking about bringing in others who have expertise in areas I don’t. So we get a team of, say, 5 writers to develop an online resource.

Since we’ll also overlap in expertise it makes sense to do this on a Wiki or similar allowing collaborative writing and editing of pages. And once you’ve got a wiki that opens up a whole new world.

But if you’re doing it as a wiki why not just bypass Digital Birmingham and do it ourselves? Not gonna work. It’s pretty well established that most collaborative online endeavours work when a lot of people contribute a very small amount of time and effort and a relatively small number doing the heavy lifting - the ripple effect, if you like. Wikipedia works because the contributor base is huge. This wiki would have a contributor base of, at most, 100 people. And, to be honest, even though it’s my idea I don’t have the time to dedicate to writing the bulk.

So here’s the proposal.

• Digital Birmingham (or, if they don’t go for it, some other body) commission a team of people to produce an online resource based on their requirements and specifications.
• This is produced using wiki software (MediaWiki or the new-to-me XWiki).
• On delivery the wiki is opened up for others to edit. I’d suggest an approved registration system which would allow anyone to join but would have a delay to prevent vandalism.
• The wiki can then be expanded and, more critically, kept up to date by the community who can use it as a resource for their own work (training, consultancy, etc)

What do you people think?

Yesterday many in the Birmingham digerati were in attendance at the Birmingham Post’s Big Debate on the topic Digital: Power or Powerless? The event was live-blogged by Pete Ashton, & the idea was those of us who were in the hall would also live twitter it.

An idea which started off grand & all - until disaster struck when the wifi access which had been especially arranged for us in the hall went down, with the room being a faraday cage blocking out all mobile phone signals as well.

I decided it seemed to make sense to continue taking notes on my phone (until it’s battery gave out, but that’s another story…) of what I would have been twittering had it been available, & it would seem a shame to lose that, so here they are below. The live tweets up until that point (& also the tweets from outside the hall) are aggregated at Twemes amongst other sites.

————

chris cook - online musician

if you’re a creative (artist, musician, whatever) using the web to promote yourself, to showcase your work - at what point do you stop giving it away for free & start charging for it ?

(related question - if you’re a band selling singles in the traditional way, selling 10,000 copies of your record has big kudos; but 10,000 plays on myspace doesn’t give the same kudos. why not ? at what point will it carry the same kudos ?)

joanna geary - digital journalist

birmingham has had a particularly high uptake of mobile interweb use.

what is the role of the regional press in the new world where people can get their local news more efficiently from the web 2.0 ?

blogs provide us with untrustworthy content - but then what makes partisan newspaper journalism any more trustworthy ?

it seems odd hearing joanna describe the created in birmingham crowd as ‘them’ - i very much consider her to be one of ‘us’ !

doug williams - bt

every time we get a new distribution channel, we get a new kind of story to tell due to the new way of telling the story. back in the days of the jester telling the story from his head & the oral tradition, he would would change the story in reaction to the reactions of the audience. theatres & books ossified - fixed - the story; the ‘new interactive media’ is actually a bit like a return to the early days, though still to all intents & purposes a lot of new media storytellling is just old media wearing a new shirt.

on the other hand, it’s all very well getting excited by the ability of the audience to shape the narrative - but i’m the audience, i’m paying the writer ect to entertain me, i want to hear the story *they’re* telling, not being expected to write the story for them !

anthony rose - head of digital media & tech, & heading the iplayer project

power is all about choice - if you ohave more choice, you have more power

i’m getting irritated at the constant stream of cynicism about the multiplicity of online content meaning that it’s all crap & so hard to find the decent stuff - how is a monopoly of media any different from this ? decent stuff is no harder to find if you’ve got a wide selection to choose from than if you’ve got practically nothing to choose from !

‘top viewed’ only really works if it gets reset every once in a while - if the top viewed is top viewed because it’s there at the top of the top viewed box, then inevitably nothing else will make it to the top unless there’s a reset mechanism

(twitter from markmedia - “does everybody in every digital debate have to rehash the history of media” - ho ho, far too true !)

(from twitter - pigsonthewing “nobody seems to remember, or at least acknowledge, Usenet (earlier BBSs) and their liberating role” - i wonder if the reason for this is the fundamental shift between then & now of the ease of access; nu-web is everywhere on your mobile & live on your fast connexion; usenet was fixed to your desktop computer in your office (or living room) & by & large periodical due to slow speed & time-metred connexion)

thinking about pete ashton’s ‘iplayer tip jar’ blog post - is the business model for the online future one of relying on honesty & donations ? let people pay what they content is worth for them ?

jo seems to agree - we need to get away from the obsession with advertising as the way to monetise our content; we need to come up with creative solutions to the problem of how to generate revenue.

why all this talk of ‘new’ ? the term ‘new media’ is 10 years old; consumer access to the web 15 & more years old - ‘the web’ surely is by now mainstream media ?

another bang-on observation from jo - young people are no more switched-on as a class than middle-aged & old people.

for a programme (or whatever) to have a website just for the sake of having one is a pointless waste of money; the show should only have a website if it actually warrants one, if there is any actual extra content about it which can go on a site to justify it.

————-

Other blogs about the debate:

• Stef
• Pete
• Nick
• Chris
• Jon

First of all I want to point out that I am writing this at the sacrifice of the three hundred other more urgent writing tasks cluttering my desk top, look grateful internet.

My main problem, as referenced in the earlier post, with the name “Birmingham Bloggers” (clumsy alliteration aside) is not so much with the creaky and antiquated term “blogger”, if I write on a blog then surly I am a blogger lofty aspirations of journalism or no. There is certainly a case to be made that “blogging” has become a default catch all term to do with any content produced for the, or disseminated by the internet that even smell slightly 2.0. So if blogger I am called, then blogger I shall be.

Now this would seem that I have a problem with “Birmingham”, I want to make very clear that I am a massive Birmingham fan, not just the football team, which I was also dragged up to slavishly follow the results of. But the city; its people, culture, colour and character (now THAT’S good alliteration). I’m very proud of coming from Birmingham, maybe not Northfield where I grew up, but defiantly Birmingham.

Unfortunately so is everyone else, we as brummies tend to be so obsessed with competing for the largely fictional “Second City” status, so much that it ends up coming round and biting us in our perfectly formed backsides. One of the symptoms of the “Second City” fever is the curious predilection of naming everything with some permutation of Birmingham or “Brum”. This strikes me as a little short sighted and somewhat restricting considering that all the smaller satellite cities like Dudley or Wolverhampton are within commuting distance and the internet can be said to be making geography largely irrelevant anyway.

If we look at the hallowed London which inevitable people will do, ventures their rarely mention London or any of its boroughs, they seldomfeel the need. Even if by announcing our proud Birmingham roots in our names is a rejection of the London model, it is still a reaction to London, which in a way, placing London on a pedestal. If we are to compete with other cities (which is a weird concept in it self worthy of a more elaborate post) then we need to drop the inferiority complex.

That is not to say the amount of creative amusement we are missing, the best part of being in a school band was the naming in my opinion, limiting ourselves to having to include the schools name into the title takes away fun.

That is not to say there is inherent value in blowing our own trumpets, sites like B:ins made specifically to re-address the balance in a light hearted way are a good example, but lets not it seep into every corner of our creative output.

Que argument; …………now