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

‘Hyperlocal’ has been a buzzword in the online engagement community for about eighteen months, and to be honest it’s not one I’ve been comfortable with: why try and define a sub-category of ‘local’ which is itself pretty undefinable? I still have a bit of a problem with it, but yesterday it did become clearer to [...]

I’m concerned about the Digital Economy Bill so I’ve just sent one of those standard lobbying emails to my MP. I used the online form at 38 Degrees because it was easy, but I made substantial changes to the message (I would have added more but I was in a hurry, hence the convenience of [...]

A while ago I chewed over the problem of making it easy for members of the public to leave useful contextualised information for others in spite of opposing commercial incentives. Whether their developers intended it or not, foursquare could be the solution. I had been incensed by a cashpoint in Birmingham’s International Convention Centre. It [...]

Tom Watson MP explains why the Tories really shouldn’t privatise BBC Radio One. “Radio One provides unique high quality content to a young audience. It engages them in important social action campaigns and provides a first class news service, second to none on any other BBC network. That’s before you begin to look at its [...]

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:

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, [...]

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 [...]

I was a little angry this morning. As I was trying to catch a train from St Albans, a smiley, bouncy young lady thrust a carrier-bag into my path. “Would you like a free lunch,” she chirrupped. It wasn’t a question. She was coercing me into her sinister game of wasting resources and fattening the [...]