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

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 [...]

Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a little girl and her name was Nicky. And she had a shop. Actually that’s not quite true: Nicky doesn’t actually have a shop. What she does have is a website, a Flickr account and a load of junk. It was rather an unsual shop [...]

For a little while I’ve been aware of a blog about my postcode area of B29, but it had never dawned on me to offer to contribute. So today I offered my services, and jumped in by plotting B29 onto a Google map. And in so doing I remembered the void that used to be [...]

I have a favourite tree. It’s not so much the tree itself though, as its location: slap bang in the middle of the pavement. It’s quite an old tree, and clearly the footpath has been built around it: I often wonder why it’s there. The trees are otherwise in a deliberate line, equally distanced, along [...]

I keep telling people how my life has altered since using Twitter, even though I’m well aware of how sad that sounds. The thing is it’s not really about Twitter at all, but about people: all Twitter did was help me find them. This post will appear particularly self-indulgent: it’s trying to articulate something that [...]

Professional and amateur photographers were yesterday given the opportunity to share their work and swap photos, at an event organised by Birmingham Photospace. The ‘Flash Swap’ was the group’s first publicity event, intended to raise the profile of their campaign for a dedicated photography gallery in Birmingham. Although hidden away in a dark corner of [...]

I’ve started a fledgling blog to help me make sense of Birmingham’s creative organisations; of the different names and acronymns that crop up when people talk about Birmingham’s various ‘creative’ and ‘social media’ groups (the two seem to overlap an awful lot). This started from a comment I posted on Paradise Circus months ago, and [...]

Simply a flash mob of Twitterers in Birmingham City Centre. Bring along a sign with something like "I'm a twitterer", "Twitter rocks", "tweet tweet" written on it. At midday we (I guess I ought to join the humiliation; what have done to deserve this?) will stand still for two or three minutes, holding our signs up. For people to laugh at. So the more who join us the less embarrassing it will be. Actually it's a great idea for showing our physical presence to the nay-sayers, so please come along if you can. And it'll be fun. Honest.

Visit Twitter flash mob in Birmingham tomorrow

Producing a consultation document that the average member of the public can understand is easy, if you really care. Birmingham itself has plenty of top class graphic communicators, journalists, copywriters and sub-editors. The Big City Plan is such a massive undertaking that there are, presumably, the financial resources to make sure the public is consulted properly. It seems that it’s just the will that isn’t there.

These are my links for 27 January 2009 from 23:02 to 23:02