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

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 [...]

I’ve been meaning to go for ages, and on Saturday I finally went to Birmingham’s Pen Museum. Nikki Pugh steered me there: I’m not sure I’d have found it otherwise. It’s one of those incredible places that sit politely out of the limelight but are full of cool stuff: in this case, nibs, nibs, nibs, [...]

A few weeks ago Nikki Pugh and I were walking through the empty market stalls in Birmingham, and were struck by how much they resembled table-tennis tables. What a waste, we thought. Yesterday we put that right. Nikki and Charlie, who facilitate the BARG events, organised a bunch of us to meet at the vegetable market [...]

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’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