Created in Birmingham

On May 1st Pete Ashton, being myself, will stop running Created in Birmingham. It’ll be run by Chris Unitt.

First the admin stuff.

If you’re not already doing so, please start sending email to createdinbirmingham [at] gmail.com so that they go directly to Chris.

I’ll still be around as a kind of “blogger emeritus” making sure the handover is smooth. I might even post occasionally but not too much.

Now for the why.

If you’ve been following the blog for a while you’ll have noticed a slowdown in posting recently compared to the heady days of last year. The blunt truth is I’m not as interested in running this blog as I was. The blog worked as a document of someone who knew nothing about how the arts and culture as they explored that world and figured it out. After a year I’m not on that journey anymore. That’s not to say I’ve figured it all out – that would be impossible – but I’m thinking about other things. In short, I’m not the right person to run this site anymore.

But the process of blogging here has been tremendous. I owe this site a lot as it’s given me access to people and ideas I wouldn’t have had otherwise. If I’ve become anything of worth this last year it’s thanks to having a platform on Created in Birmingham to do so. So it makes sense to make that platform available to others.

In discussions with co-founder Stef Lewandowski and Helga Henry of Creative Republic (who source the £500 per month funding for this blog) we came up with a number of ideas for how to take CiB forward most of which were kinda complex and needed some serious planning. Meanwhile the blog was in danger of getting less relevant as I posted less and less. So a decision was made. We’d get someone to take over full time for 6 months. After than we’ll figure out where it goes next.

Chris is, I think, relatively new on the Birmingham arts scene. He’s comfortable with the blogging medium and has started exploring the arts world with his own blog and blogging work for Fierce and New Generation Arts. In other words he’s very similar to how I was last January. He’ll be more focussed on digging out relatively obscure pockets of activity in the city and pushing them on the blog as well as continuing to link to all the relevant online activity – the sort of things I should have been doing but haven’t lately.

More importantly, he’ll be running the blog the way he thinks it should be run. One of the nice things about running CiB is I’ve been making it up as I go along, trying new angles and ways of reporting on the city within a loose remit. While I’d imagine he’ll use what I’ve been doing as an initial template he’s free to tear it all up and start again if he sees fit. The blog format is flexible like that and it’s his to make his own, just as I did.

And then, after 6 months or so, we’ll see where we are. Maybe Chris will be ready to hand over to someone else. Maybe he’ll have set up a team of people with him as editor. Maybe he’ll have done something completely different. All that matters is it’ll be a weblog that links up Birmingham’s artistic and creative communities and inspires others to do the same.

As for myself, this frees me up to take what I’ve learned this last year or so into new places, hopefully exciting and relevant ones. You can, if you want, follow my progress at peteashton.com.

And, needless to say, thanks to you all for providing the reason and subject matter for this blog to have worked as well as it has. I am eternally grateful.

And so, once we’ve removed all the references to me on the site and replaced them with him, take it away Chris!

I’ve spent today ploughing through a month of items in Google Reader from blogs and news sources in Birmingham which I’d not managed to keep on top of this last month and I must confess I gave up when I got back to March 12th with 600 still to go and marked them all as read. This is not ideal for a “blog of record” but I figured best to look to the future.

And, to be honest, there are enough Birmingham blogs out there now that you don’t need to rely on Created in Birmingham to keep on top of everything and I hope there’ll be more emerging as the Summer Of Art kicks off this year.

That said it can take a while to build up a decent list of feeds to monitor and since I’ve got a bloody huge one I figured it would make sense to share it.

This is an OPML file of all my Birmingham feeds. Don’t worry about what OPML means – it’s just a big list. Save that file to your computer and then import it into your favourite feed reader. If you’re using Google Reader click on “Settings” in the top right corner, then “Import/Export”. Follow the instructions and you’ll suddenly have 239 feeds of varying value letting you know what’s going on.

A few of them will be dead and a few of them will seem irrelevant so you might need to do a bit of pruning according to your needs. And of course there’s always more out there to find – I’m adding and removing stuff all the time. But if you want a rocket up your blogging arse this is as good a one as any.

You might also like to try Jon Bounds’ list which he uses for Birmingham It’s Not Shit so it’s got a wider remit. (I’ll confess to not trying it as I have enough to be going on with myself.)

Have fun!

(And if anyone else wants to share their OPMLs leave a link in the comments.)

Hello, As Pete mentioned, I’m Danny and I will be your guest blogger for a while, I will be trying to give you all the Birmingham friendly creative news that I find, although my main priority will be not screwing up like deleting the internet, getting Pete sued into the ground, or accidentally starting a Civil War. If there is something that you feel should be covered and I have missed, drop me a line at artiseasy(at)hotmail(dot)co(dot)uk.

I don’t feel so much that I have been given the keys to a brand new sports car, as much as that I’ve been given the keys to an 18 wheeler lorry and its my job not to plough that bugger into a bus queue full of nuns and orphans. So without further adoing

• “Australian lawyer, novelist and human rights campaigner Randa Abdel- Fattah will be at a special event on the eve of Birmingham’s second annual Writers Awards evening”.

• A nice interview with Catherine O’Flynn, winner of the Costa First Novel Award here.

• Audiances Central normally have some good opportunities, these caught my eye, or rather caught my girlfriends eye, she’s giving me a hand and lovely hands they are too.

Thanks to Julia for covering Created in Birmingham while I was away. However, on returning I’m still kinda stupid busy so, since he’d previously expressed an interest in doing this kind of blogging, have asked Danny Smith to have a go for a few days. We were in the pub Sunday and he was telling me of stuff and about people I’d not heard of so should hopefully add a bit of variety.

Take it away Danny!

Do you use the social bookmarking service del.icio.us? Do you come across links that might be of interest to Created in Birmingham readers? Can you really not be faffed to email me the link? If you can answer all these questions with a Yes then read on. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about and have no interest in finding out then don’t worry.)

Next time you bookmark something add the tag for:peteashton. This will put it in this list which I’m monitoring. If I think it’s worthy then I can post it here with just a couple of clicks.

Easy!

While the ceremony for the Guardian Media Awards might have been a bit of a farce, the philosophy behind the awards is a good one, celebrating innovation rather than some arbitrary metric of “success”. And I don’t just say that because Created in Birmingham got one. In Monday’s Guardian there was a supplement featuring interviews with all the winners and I was rather pleased with how mine came out, particularly as it was conducted by phone with me still in bed.

Oddly the articles don’t seem to be online so I’ve scanned the blogging spread.

The full size jpeg weighs in at 1.5mb and I have some copies of the supplement if those recording the cultural history of Birmingham think it a worthy addition to their files.

Hello, my name is Julia Gilbert, your Created in Birmingham guest blogger. You may also know me from such social media tools as Flickr, del.icio.us, Tumblr and Twitter.

While Pete is taking a well-deserved trip across the pond to attend SXSWi on behalf of us Brummies. I’ll be taking up the reins, so that nothing urgent gets missed.

I am not a professional ‘creative’ so have no work of my own to promote, although I am a big fan of creative activity, especially stuff happening locally. I have lived in Brum for 11 years now, so consider myself an honorary Brummie.

My own blog has suffered a severe lack of activity of late, but having attended the recent Brum Bloggers meetup, I feel a new surge of enthusiasm and hope to get it back on track soon! I also blog much more regularly on The Kitten Channel, and occasionally on BiNS (where I am the Typo Fairy, who comes and magically fixes Jon‘s typos before he hits Publish or sometimes after if he’s being impatient!).

Hopefully Pete will be able to forward any important emails to me, but if you have some urgent news and you want to make sure I get it, feel free to copy me in on julia.gilbert AT gmail.com.

Just hope I don’t break anything!

If you were at the Creative Republic launch / Created in Birmingham birthday party the other week you might well be in this. It also has my “speech”, which is handy as I had no idea what I was saying.

If you can’t see the video click here

Due to increased expected numbers the venue for the joint Creative Republic / Created in Birmingham party this Thursday (that’s tomorrow!) has changed. It’s now at the Vertu Bar at 25 Frederick Street in the Jewellery Quarter which looks a little like this.

All other details remain the same.

Oh, apparently I’m giving a speech at 6.30. Which should be fun.

See you there!

In other news I’m horribly behind on the blogging, the irony of which hasn’t escaped me. Hope to catch up soon…

Please note venue change

21st Feb, 6pm onwards.
Concrete at Big Peg the Vertu Bar at 25 Frederick Street, Jewellery Quarter.

Spread the word!

(Please RSVP to lorraine [at] creativerepublic.org.uk so we can get an idea of how many people are turning up)

Inspired, it must be said, by Dubber’s Newswire I’ve been working on a new service on Created in Birmingham – the News River. For want of a better name. You can find it in the menu bat at the top of each page.

This should hopefully mitigate a few of issues. Firstly it’ll allow me to draw attention to things that aren’t strictly within the CiB remit. Secondly it allows me to throw up information quickly that wouldn’t necessarily warrant a full blog post. And thirdly it should make the blog itself more focussed, maybe even leading to more original content.

This also means you’re getting a two-stream site. You can just have the blog posts or you can have the full torrent of information. No obligation either way. While it’s still bedding in style-wise everything works so subscribe to the feed and prepare for the deluge!

I’ve been sitting on this for a week or so (well, that’s a slight exaggeration – it’s become something of a worst kept secret, though I did try) but with the publication of the shortlist for the Media Guardian Innovation Awards it can be spoken of loudly and proudly.

Created in Birmingham has been shortlisted in the category of Independent Blog along with We Make Money Not Art and From The Frontline. Normally the winner would be announced on March 6th at the awards ceremony but, I’ve been told, we’ve all won. From the email:

This was the most controversial category which the judges looked at, for a number of reasons. Some judges felt it was impossible to judge a variety of diverse blogs against each other, while the nature of innovation in blogging was also a topic of much debate. For this reason, the judges have decided not to award a winner this year. Instead, they have chosen three short listed entrants to represent the breadth of talent and diversity of subjects within the UK blogosphere. These will each receive special commendations.

Which suits me fine!

Normally one would greet such news with a smile and move on with the business of the day, but a little expansion on why this is a good thing is needed. Created in Birmingham, like many blogs of its ilk, was set up to fill a perceived gap. One of its many aims was to show that the blogging platform could be used to link Birmingham’s creative community together and, by example, encourage the other communities in Birmingham to do the same. Through my years in blogging and, before that, fanzines I knew the theory was sound but alongside this was the matter of cost. While City website initiatives were costing tens of thousands of pounds and barely delivering we wanted to show what you could do with a basic WordPress installation (free), an off-the-shelf template (free), some hosting (about £5 a month) and my time (£500 a month). Above all we wanted Created in Birmingham to be completely independent, which could have been tricky with the funding issue but thanks to Stef and the Creative Republic board acting as a firewall we were able to achieve this. I answer to no-one other than my conscience and any prejudices and biases (and they are there) are my own.

Created in Birmingham has been a success in that people in the city know about it, but there’s been a nagging sense in my gut that a lot of this is down to novelty with people not really getting it or thinking it’ll die off when the next fad comes along. I, on the other hand, think we’ve only just begun, and by “we” I don’t mean Stef and myself – I mean Birmingham as a whole. The big central aim of this blog is to get everyone else blogging at some level, whether it’s doing the same amount of coverage as Created in Birmingham or just throwing odd bits of news out every few days or something completely different. I want to see the city talking with itself in a non-hierarchical, distributed, linked up way. Currently there are a few dozen, maybe a couple of hundred, people doing this. I want to see thousands, if not millions. I want it to be impossible to get a handle on the Birmingham internet scene. I want it to be as alive as the streets themselves, if not more so, using free software, cheap hosting and heaps of enthusiasm.

So yeah, joint-winning this award is nice because it gives us a big stick to beat this message home with. So thanks to those who nominated the blog, and thanks to the MEGAS judges for giving it to us.

Party!

Why the hell not? Keep Thursday 21st Feb free. Details to follow.

Some notes:

Created in Birmingham came about at a Flickrmeet when Pete Ashton and Stef Lewandowski got talking about blogging about Birmingham. It launched properly in January 2007 with Pete blogging and Stef handling the technical and financial sides. The invoices go to Creative Republic who are 100% hands off.

Pete Ashton has been blogging at peteashton.com since 2000 and was one of the first wave of bloggers in the UK. He is currently setting himself up as a blogging consultant, something that still makes him question the sanity of the world.

Stef Lewandowski is a man with too many ideas. He runs 3form and blogs at steflewandowski.com. When I talk about CiB as “we” I mean Stef and Pete.

Right, we’re about to enter a month of down-time on Created in Birmingham as I’m off on my holidays for a month. I’ll still be checking in every few days and monitoring the RSS feeds, posting stuff that’s quick and easy to post, but services will be reduced quite substantially. Suffice to say this policy will be adhered to very strongly.

If you think there’s a gap that needs to be filled over the next month then why not start your own blog? It’s dead easy!

I return on January 11th, all being well. Thank you all for your support and for providing the activity that powers this blog over the last year. Have a good Winterval and rest well for a fantastic 2008!

Normal service has been rather disrupted by the thickness of my head these last couple of days. I’m hoping it’s just a short term thing that will be remedied by orange juice, duvets and dumb movies. Rest assured everything of interest I’ve come across is flagged ready to be turned into blog posts as soon as my brain is working again.

One unfortunate effect of this is I was unable to attend the Pub(lic) Conversation on Studio Space at Vivid tonight which looked to be a lively affair. I expect there’ll be a recording made public soon but if anyone feels the need to write up a report let me know and I’ll link to it here.

Right, back to bed for me…

Created in Birmingham is currently funded in a very roundabout way by the Arts Council via Creative Republic. If I haven’t been too transparent about this it’s because to be honest I never really knew who was paying for it and I’ve always had complete editorial freedom over what goes on here. Basically I just send Helga at Fierce an invoice each month and she sends me a cheque. No questions asked. Did I mention how lucky I am?

But I digress. Relying on funding isn’t necessarily the most sustainable way to finance a website so Stef (who appears to have evolved into my “band manager”) and myself have been thinking about strategies for getting advertising and sponsorship onto the blog without messing everything up and making it an ugly Nascar of a site. Before reading on be aware that we’re just talking about this for now. Nothing has been decided and we’d welcome any and all feedback on this subject, especially as we think the readers of the blog are going to be the advertisers.

Here’s some ground rules.

• We won’t accept any ads we don’t approve of or that aren’t relevant to the blog. Money is not the only criteria.
• We want ads to be of use to the readers. If they are then people are more likely to look at them, which is better for the advertisers.
• Advertisers will have no say in the content of the blog, nor on the placement of their ads regarding content.
• Anyone who wants to place an ad that moves in any way will be shown the door. Static images only.

A model that Stef came up with (and, again, this is just an idea) was for four 200 pixel-wide boxes at the top of each page selling for £50 a fortnight each. I’m not completely sold on the format but the spirit is right, keeping things relatively affordable and simple. You’re not paying for clickthroughs or page impressions – just the presence on every page of the blog.

So what sort of ads are we thinking are a good thing?

• The main impetus was to give people a way of effectively staying at the top of the blog. I might post about an event a fortnight before it happens and then it slips down into the archive. So time-specific stuff will be of use – festivals, conferences, gallery shows, that sort of thing.
• Created in Birmingham does seem to get a lot of touristy type traffic through Google for people looking for arts stuff to do in the city so the likes of Ikon and the Symphony Hall would be potential clients.
• Training courses that are looking to target creatives in the city might find this a useful thing. Let people know when the next rounds of funding are coming up and so on.
• New websites and blogs could use it as a launch tool. Also those sites that want to push their arts / creative coverage.
• Jobs is an interesting one. I know of a few people who’ve gotten jobs on the rare occasions I’ve posted about them. Looking for a new graphic designer or photographer?

You’ll notice that a lot of these are things I’d hopefully be blogging about anyway and I intend to continue to do so. CiB isn’t going to become a paid-for-placement blog (please shoot me if it does) but this will allow people to have a presence at the top of every page and in doing so support the work that goes into the blog (and it’s future expansion).

And if you just don’t like ads then switch on AdBlock. I’ll make sure the images are stored in a consistent place so you never see them. But hopefully they’ll be useful enough that you won’t want to block them.

There’s other things to think about. What about the RSS feed? Is that sacred? And who are the readers of this blog anyway? I think I have a pretty good idea but it’d be good to get some figures. Speaking of which we’ll get some decent and accurate readership figures together soon so people have an idea of the numbers they’d be reaching.

What kinda excites me about this is the core readership of the blog will also be the main group advertising on it, making it into a nice community of checks and balances. Advertisers know how the blog works because they read it regularly so they’ll keep things relevant.

This ain’t gonna happen until well into the New Year (as part of a wholesale overhaul of the site) and we’d welcome your opinions on this. Would you buy an ad on the site? How much would you pay? What sort of ads would you find useful?

Further reading:

• An inspiration for this ad model is The Deck.
• Chatting about this with Andrew Dubber fed into his ad strategy on New Music Strategies so if you see similarities that’s why.