Created in Birmingham

It’s nice when you ask for something and then it turns up, even if it takes a while. Four years ago I (Pete, btw) put in a request to the interwebs for a “searchable small gigs database feed site thingy” which I could throw a bunch of criteria into and be given regular updates of stuff happening in my area that might be of interest - a middle ground between my usual sources and the useless torrent of information that most what’s on sites provide. There have been a few attempts since then but Live Brum is the first that’s gotten me slightly excited.

Partly this is the pedigree. It’s run by Josh Hart who recently left Made Media to concentrate on this project. Made, as you may know, built the fantastic Town Hall Symphony Hall website and Live Brum looks to be applying the ideas there to the rest of the city’s venues.

The other part is that its incredibly flexible. You can filter the information in numerous ways and subscribe to those results with ease. Stuff like subscribing to Rock and Pop at the Hare and Hounds is nice enough but being able to subscribe to a search for a band or any keyword is quite lovely.

Lots of other neat things too, such as embedding the event in your blog or website in the same way as YouTube videos, the magic being if the details change on Live Brum those changes will be reflected on your site too. Think of them as dynamic flyers. Here’s one:

And, with my tech-head on, the way Josh has built the site lets him add all sorts of new and innovative features and integration with other social networking sites with ease. This is still early days for the site.

The trick, of course, is making sure the site has all the correct information. From chatting to Josh the other week he’s pretty sure he’s got this sorted out in a sustainable way, partly by ensuring promoters and venues can take their information back out in a variety of ways making it worth their while putting it in. I think there might be a bit of a steep learning curve for some of them here but, frankly, it’s about time the live music industry caught up with the 21st century. And, of course, if this site works then it will put Birmingham miles ahead of most other cities.

So, in short, cautious big grins all round. Nice one.

7inch Cinema have a new website! And it’s very bloggy by the looks of things with RSS and everything. Worth checking out the other sections too as they’ve crammed it full of some really good writings.

Twitter is a service that’s getting a fair bit of traction in Brum right now. Like most of these things it’s as useful as you find it to be so don’t feel you’re “doing it wrong” if you don’t get it, but I’m finding it rather invaluable so you might too.

It’s a combination of things really. The format is limited to 140 characters so it meshes well with SMS texting meaning you can use it from your phone but it also works on the website and via instant messaging along with a bunch of 3rd party applications (I like Twhirl myself). At it’s core it works along the same lines as Facebook status updates and you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s not much difference, but the magic comes from the way it manages conversations and the fine tuning you can do.

Above all it’s an example of what I’m calling an “ambient stream”. Nothing on Twitter is actually that important, unless it is. You can just check in every so often and get a feel of what your community/ies are up to. If there’s anything of relevance that’s great but if not then it’s no great loss. You can spend hours communicating with people or just ignore the service for a day - it doesn’t matter.

I find it useful for random meetups. If someone “tweets” (as it’s known) that they’re in a certain cafe or pub then I might pop in if I’m in the area. Or I might not. Or if I’m looking for help or advice with something I can send out a quick message and see if anyone’s free with no obligation.

(Oh, here’s a handy video which might help. Or not.)

Anyway, if you think it might be useful have a play and see what you think. But be aware it took me a good year to get my head around what I might use it for so it might not hit you at first.

So here’s a list of some of the Birmingham-types who are on Twitter that Created in Birmingham readers might want to follow. You might also want to scan through the list of people I’m following if it takes your fancy. I’ve tried to keep this list more arts/design than tech but there are, of course, overlaps.

In no particular order
Antonio Gould
Jon Bounds
Julia Gilbert
Paul Bradshaw
Stef Lewandowski
Andrew Dubber
Nick Lockey
Ruth Ward
Russ L
Nick Booth
Chris Unitt
John @ 383
Mark Badger
Joanna Geary has two accounts
Danny Smith
Craig of Friends of the Stars
Antonio Roberts
Keri Davis
Ana Milgram
Dunc Autumnstore
Kerry Fused
Anthony Herron
and Pete Ashton.

I should probably stop there. The a good strategy would be to find some people you already know or are connected to and look at who they’re following. And if you fancy some really unfocused ambient Twitter-noise you could subscribe to this feed of Birmingham Twitterers.

Yes, it’s all kinda pointless. That’s kinda the point.

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Okay, here’s a good case study. Immediately after writing this I’m thinking what I might do before going home today. A tweet from Kerry pops up on my computer that she’s “going to ikon to private view for ruth claxton exhibition”. Hmm. That sounds interesting. Didn’t know about that. I may well pop up there.

Result!

The Birmingham St Patrick’s Festival has a new website, proudly launched last month.

Given that this represents one of the major cultural celebrations in the city, one which has been claimed to be one of the largest outside of New York (if I remember rightly) I’d be interested to hear what you all think.

BIAD has a new website and rather than just tell you that I thought it’d be nice to reproduce a few of the images from their gallery there.

Sonia Poli - BA Visual Communication

Helen Freeman - BA Fashion and Textiles

Francesca Prowse - BA Visual Communication

Hat tip to D’log

Andy at Substrakt wonders, what’s up with Eastiside? Considering he works there and has friends who live there he’s surprised to realise he doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen with the redevelopment. So he digs around online and finds… not much really.

On the one hand this isn’t too surprising. The Eastside development is a pretty massive project with loads of companies and government departments involved so tying it all together at a granular level would be a nightmare. But if you’re just interested in the broader strokes it would be handy to have some kind of website that brings together all the developer sketches and so on into one place.

Something like, say, Manchester’s New Islington site, as suggested by Andy. Only a little less c-r-a-z-y please.

I can’t think of anything for Eastside. Does it exist? Should the council (or whatever body is overseeing the whole project) do one? Is that an unreasonable request? If it is, does anyone want to start a blog on it? I suspect the AdSense revenue would be pretty good on something like that… Let me know if you need a hand setting it up.

Photo by Dr King Bertt. Click on it for details.

A press release through from Marketing Birmingham tells us that TAK! have gotten the tender for the new Visit Birmingham website. I wouldn’t normally blog about such things but this is, I feel, pretty interesting.

1) TAK! is a relatively small web design company, not the sort of operation you’d expect a major City project to go to (unless I’m mistaken).

2) TAK!, in my opinion, really understand the internet and should be able to provide all the “Web 2.0″ stuff required without bolloxing it up. That MB were able to see this in their application is a credit to them.

3) TAK! come, if you’ll excuse the expression, “from the street” as evidenced by their Stickernation project so understand there’s more to Birmingham than the usual tourist stuff (as important as that is). Whether they can get this through to the content of the site is debatable, but their branding of the site should be interesting.

From the press release (Word doc):

“They are clearly experts in their field and had thought about the long term development of the site, not just a quick fix. They incorporated Web 2.0 technologies in their proposals as it is an important way of facilitating user generated content but did not overload on gimmicks just for the sake of it. They also proposed future extensions of their ideas to really add value and ensure that the website will be flexible enough to keep evolving.”

The Visit Birmingham website was created to encourage people to come to the city, make it easy for them to do so and ensure they make the most of what Birmingham has to offer while they’re here. The new design will aim to place Birmingham at the forefront of digital technology. It will be stylish yet simple and will incorporate a fresh look with an innovative content strategy to engage with, retain and guide users.

Best of luck to them!

Animation Forum has a new website with a members area for people to upload their work to and connect with others in the area. Interestingly they’re also using a Facebook group for discussions which is a sensible move - using a service that already exists and most people are already on.

Well, no sooner had I said goodbye to all that than I get a phone call from Marketing Birmingham at the airport. Suffice to say the phone is now off but this one’s worth posting immediately.

(That and I’m stuck in Osaka airport with free wifi for the next five hours…)

The Visit Birmingham website, which should be the first port of call for anyone planning to come here, is having a massive overhaul in the new year and local web companies are invited to bid for the tender. Or something.

Agencies are asked to register their interest and complete a pre-qualification questionnaire by 5pm Monday 17 December by post to Lisa Smith, On-line Campaign Manager. Invitation information is obtainable from lisa.smith@marketingbirmingham.com or telephone 0121 202 5115.

I’ve had a look through the material and there’s a reasonable emphasis on Web 2.0 stuff which boils down the following:

In the proposal please consider how Marketing Birmingham should apply Web 2.0 technologies, platforms and applications to their brand visitbirmingham.com on-line?
• Blogs
• Vlogs
• Social networks / communities
• User Generated Content (UGC)
• Wikis
• Podcasts
• Online video
• RSS
• Tagging
• Mash-ups and Open API’s
• AJAX (Asynchronous Java and XML)

While this is very welcome to see, how it’s implemented is going to be crucial. Do you “apply” blogs by having them or by providing adequate information for bloggers to use? Or both? By Social Networks do you mean developing on in house (NO!) or integrating effectively with Facebook, etc? With UGC (a horrible term but pretty defacto now) why should people submit their own work to your site? What kind of ownership are you giving them? Is RSS just going to be a token offering or will it be taylored? Open APIs are a fantastic thing to see but what exactly does Mashup mean?

Whatever, I’m just the messenger here but this could be something really excellent if only the right company gets the job. So if you’re the right company get in touch with them right away.

But please, let it be someone who understands the social aspects of such a site and not just the techincal bits. And, above all, not some Web 2.Oaf.

Photographer Craig Holme’s Crowded Gallery website has had an overhaul.

It has more of a black and white print focus. I also prefer the more modern home page, which has almost everything in one location - including an RSS feed for new images.

Congrats to Birminghamusic.com on winning the BDI Industry and Genius award in the category for Products and Genius: Digital Design. They write about wining it here:

The panel received over 100 entries for the awards and in most cases 3 entries were shortlisted, as in the Digital Design category that Birminghamusic.com was in. It was quite fascinating seeing some of the amazing designs and projects that were emerging from local businesses and in one case the award was given to two winners, as the panel simply could not name one to be better than another.

The Digital Design category was one of the last to be announced and left us nervously sitting on the edge of our seats awaiting the panel’s decision, when they announced that the winning project received some flattering comments from the panel, including -
“Locally empowering. A fantastic model.”
“Looking inwards and outwards, it promotes the city and is encouraging entrepreneurship”
“A good example of collaboration”

Then it was announced, the winners are….Birminghamusic.com.

The others shortlised in the category were Aston Computer in the Home: Aston Pride IT and Real Time Information: WMPTA/Centro.

So what’s the BDI?

The BDI (Birmingham Design Initiative) is made up of 22 professionals from the business, education and design related sectors. Their goal is to raise awareness of the importance and value of outstanding environmental / product design in the West Midlands. This is the 10th time the BDI Awards have been held since 1989, and commemorative plaques dating back more than a decade still take pride of place in design practices across the region.

Artsearch is a web directory of Arts websites which is very old school but still, searching for Birmingham (no permalink to searches unfortunately) did bring up a number of sites I wasn’t aware of. You can submit your site and they’ll put it up once they’ve reviewed it. via Audiences Central

The events listings site What’s On In Brum has had an overhaul so I had a quick look. The listings are pretty normal, allowing you to search by day and type and to see what’s happening right now across a range of areas. The Venue Guide is pretty slick, giving you an aggregation based on information put in by promoters along with a Google Map. It’s nice to see some Facebook integration although it only adds links to the site on your profile rather than events to your calendar. A bit more work needed there but it’s a start. Hopefully adoption of the iCalendar data exchange standard (meaning you can add info to your own calendar with one click) is in the offing. THSH and Facebook themselves offer this and once you start using it it’s very useful.

No RSS. At all. C’mon, this is 2007 people. Gimme a custom feed based on search terms please!

A really nice feature is the Flyer Wall which runs down the side of each page. Hovering over the listings shows you a flyer and clicking through lets you effectively download it for your own use. I can see this being very useful for my own gig listings blog and anything that enables people to share the knowledge is a good thing.

There’s no indication who’s behind this other than the fact that promoters who have a TheTicketSellers.co.uk account can sign in with the same details implying there’s some cross-ownership here. This might not seem a big deal for a consumer-facing site but if they want to build up relationships with the wide range of promoters in the city then answering the “who the hell are you?” question would be a good idea. Needless to say I think some kind of blog would be good for this.

On the whole the site, while not that revolutionary, looks much better and appears to work well. What concerns me though isn’t particularly specific to What’s On In Brum but to the whole events listings industry where the onus is on the promoter to input the same information into numerous sites. Given the iCalendar standard is pretty well established it should be easy to have promoters put their information in one place and have the sites subscribe to it ala RSS? Or am I living in a tech utopia?

The Birmingham Post is to get a new website next year. We know this because journalist Joana Geary has put in a request on her blog asking what people want from the new site so she can feed this into the design process. Which, I have to say, is a damn refreshing way to go about this sort of thing. If you’ve got some ideas go give them to her.

The IKON has a new website.

The site was built by TAK! who explain at length what it’s all about including the rather innovative Program of Events, the evolution of which was blogged here.

Given this is a rather new take on a gallery site Dom of TAK is looking for feedback.

Substrakt has posted an update of their activities which includes the announcement of the new Jibbering website for the Moseley-based record shop and cafe.

The latter has been keenly anticipated in these parts as Jibbering is an interesting and vital force on the local music scene, something which until now hadn’t been reflected online. The site now opens up all their activities to view including their regular events (frequently at the Hare and Hounds but also all over the place) and services like equipment hire and event management. And, of course, the record shop itself. If you were wondering how an indie music store can survive these days this is a good model to watch.

Some bits of the site are still being padded out, as you’d expect for something that will evolve and grow over time, including the Gallery section but I picked up a flyer the other day informing that Sami Green is the current exhibitee with a show running from Nov 1st to Dec 5th. I don’t know exactly what’ll be exhibited (and, more importantly, for sale) but she does these wonderful sculptures:

If I was going to go to just one event at the Flip Animation Festival (and remember this is me I’m talking about not necessarily you) then it’d be Animation in the YouTube Generation on Friday 2nd November from 3.30-6pm.

This panel discussion will look at the impact of new and emerging online platforms and tools and will ask what the opportunities are for animators and filmmakers and can online distribution and exhibition lead to professional commissions? The panel comprises an exiting line up of animators who have had a significant impact online and who mix this ‘amateur’ work with professional commissions: Greg McLeod, from the Brother’s McLeod who are responsible for the recent Skittles ad campaign and whose ‘Spamland’ has received nearly 1m views on You Tube; Lasse Gjertson, whose films have had a huge impact on You Tube, particularly ‘Amateur which has received more than 6m views and 6 honours, including most viewed all time; Katy Davis, who has been shortlisted for the MyMovie Mashup competition and has been a feature profile on MySpace and produced the award winning short animation, Gone Fishing. The panel will also include Ana Kronschnabl: author of Plug in Turn on: A Guide to Internet Filmmaking and is the founder of plugincinema.com. The panel will be chaired by Kate Taylor who has worked in short film distribution and exhibition since 1998 and has been involved in a number of leading festivals and agencies, including Kinofilm, onedotzero, British Council and is co-founder of the London Short Film Festival.

While this has the potential to be full of people who don’t know anything spouting off about “user generated content” and coming up with strategies to make the wonderful mess of YouTube into something resembling the old ways (sorry, I get carried away) I have a feeling this will be rather more interesting and useful than that, mainly because of the appearance of Lasse Gjertson who does stuff like this:

There is, of course, loads more going on over the three days of the festival. Check the site for details or pick up a program about the place.

Over the weekend I had two separate conversations with promoters (Al of Curates Egg and Rich from Project X) about MySpace, specifically how posting flyers into the comments of everyone in your Friends list is possibly the most tedious and long winded task ever inflicted on a human. Initially I smiled the smile of pity and assumed nothing could be done, but then it struck me. While automating this might not be possible (to my knowledge anyway - if there’s a third party tool out there do leave a comment) it can be speeded up a bit.

Heres what you need.

• The Firefox browser.
• The Greasemonkey plugin - this allows you to run scripts which change the contents of web pages.
• In this case we’re using the MySpace custom style remover script.

When enabled this removes all the junk people throw on their profiles and, most importantly, neutralises any music or video meaning you can open lots of profiles at once and not kill your computer.

Now go to you’re Friends listing page and open 10 or 20 of them in tabs at a time. While you still need to enter each comment seperately it should be much quicker now.

Any other tips on making MySpace less of a bastard? Leave a comment.

BIAD, the Birmingham Institute for Art and Design at UCE BCU, has a new website.

There are a couple of nice things about this. The most obvious is the extensive gallery of graduates’ work which serves to show off the grads and their alma mata, though links to their sites would make it really useful. The second is the news page which appears to cover a whole range of activities connected to the institute from colaborations with IKON, public lectures and events and new publications by staff.

While it might not be obvious, this new site is pretty much a blog. Indeed, it’s using Drupal, a powerful free content management system that understands the best things about weblogs. This also means they have RSS feeds - a first for an academic website that’s ostensibly all about the PR. No idea who’s behind it all but, compared to the parent site it’s a breath of fresh air.

via Nikki Pugh

BiNS does a nice review of Birmingham FIZ which is not a mis-spelling of “fizz” but stands for Free Information Zone (yup, took me a while there too). As you probably heard in various pronouncements including the phrase “digital city” over the last couple of years, Birmingham now has a wifi network across most of the city centre. To be precise:

The deal that’s been struck enables BT Openzone to install wireless basestations across the city (I believe in lamp posts) on the condition that access to council services and local information is provided for free. To get the rest of the internet you need to pay BT. Which, while not ideal, is… we’ll it’s just not ideal full stop. But it’s what we’ve got.

These local info services are provided through the new portal, birminghamfiz.com, which is formatted to work well in mobile internet devices like Treos and iPhones. The idea is that someone out and about in Birmingham who’s looking for a restaurant or wants to know what’s showing in the cinema can get the information quickly and easilly from anywhere in town. Similarly if you’re just waiting for a bus you can have a look at job vacancies and the like.

From the creative industries perspective it’s the listings that are the key thing here. In theory everyone with a mobile internet device now has a complete What’s On in their pocket. In the pub with your mate and decide you’d like to go to a gig? Surf on over to the FIZ. Sitting in a cafe chatting about the ballet? Search on the FIZ to see what the BRB are up to. You get the idea.

Of course having only just launched the info is a bit sketchy at the moment and some of the sites aren’t ideally formatted for tiny screens (for a full technical review see BiNS) but it’s early days and they’re looking for feedback. All the details are on this Digital Birmingham page and you can email feedback to digital@servicebirmingham.co.uk.

Remember, you know your businesses and your customers better than they do. Educate them. Then hopefully in time we’ll have the wifi information service we deserve, just in time for when mobile internet devices become as common as mobile phones.