Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

Yesterday I told you I was to be liveblogging with a couple of cabinet ministers. Well, I did it. The result below is not a comprehensive account of the session, but I got as much down as I could. 5:37 Andrew Mitchell telling us how great Birmingham is, and how the Tories enjoy coming here, and [...]

Yesterday I got an invitation to join other bloggers for a meeting this afternoon with Conservative cabinet ministers Baroness Warsi and Andrew Mitchell. I’ve no idea why, or what the format’s going to be; but I shall attempt to liveblog it anyway, and I shall try and put questions to them from Twitter etc (if [...]

Yesterday, as I was using the internet to prepare for a meeting, I quickly diverted to compare my election candidates and fire off an email to one asking his voting preferences. Twenty minutes later he replied. My MP is standing down, so I used TheyWorkForYou to see how her successor had voted on particular issues [...]

Recent research reveals that young people in the UK have little faith in journalists, but see them as having the greatest influence on government decisions. And tabloid journalists, it seems, are the worst of a bad bunch. The research was undertaken last week by online pollsters YouGov, on behalf of the Citizenship Foundation. Almost 4,000 [...]

In his Digital Britain Final Report, Lord Carter sets out his plan to keep Britain “at the forefront of the digital revolution”. But a revolution needs revolutionaries, who are driven by passion and not just economic incentive. Has this report overlooked the importance of people as volunteers, and the impact on their social contributions of [...]

Last week I went to hear Lord Carter discuss his Digital Britain Final Report in Birmingham. I took a laptop and tweeted a little. As a crude record of what I wrote, what follows is my Twitter stream for that event. All I’ve done is take the html from Twitter Search and pasted it here [...]

In the same spirit as our friends at the Daily Mail, this poll has no balanced evidence and a clearly biased agenda. Oh, and here’s the disgusting cartoon that accompanies Littlejohn’s inflammatory article about gipsies:

Every year the Birmingham Post polls the region for the top fifty most powerful people in Birmingham. So this year I’m doing the opposite (it’s probably been done before, but who cares). I’m looking for fifty people in Birmingham who are in the public eye but who seem to wield very little power. I’m doing [...]

Jo Swinson, Liberal Democrat MP for East Dunbartonshire, is trying to convince Parliament to allow the posting of parliamentary footage to social media services such as YouTube. She is asking other Members of Parliament to sign her Early Day Motion in support of putting parliamentary procedures online. At the time of writing 28 have done [...]