Birmingham Blogs

Off to Austin

Pete Ashton — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:09:57 EDT

It’s that time of year again. Time to go to Austin for the SXSW Interactive festival to be with my people. I’ve been jokingly describing it as a “Geek Mecca” but it’s sort of true. This is where I plan to get my batteries charged and my vision-thing focussed.

Most of my bloggery will take place on ASH-10 but I’m hoping to do a little bit of non-work stuff in Austin. Y’know, touristy stuff. So that’ll go on here, if I get it written in time.

If you’re going to be there and think the two of us talking about stuff would be a nice thing to happen, @ me on the Twitter machine.

Big City Relief

Jon Bounds — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:13:32 EDT

So, the big city plan has been a stunt for comic relief? Lenny Henry has been playing Mike Whitby all along.

Seriously, happy red nose day to Peter Schmeical and the rest of the fundraisers.

Lee Allen Photography

Kate Spragg — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:37:34 EDT

Photographer Lee Allen has recently launched his a website, and is now doing business under his own name rather than the former Front Row Photos. He has successfully integrated a blog element into his new website which gives a more personal element to the marketing of the plethora of different services offered.

Lee Allen is a self-taught photographer who originates from the wilds of Norfolk and now lives in the West Midlands. His friendly approach, coupled with his knack of capturing that â€œmomentâ€�, has seen him work for national magazines through to the BBC.

From the regal surroundings of a wedding in a stately home to the sweaty confines of a small club gig, Lee always approaches each job with the same level of commitment and professionalism ensuring breathtaking results every time.

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Turn that light out

Jon Bounds — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:31:26 EDT

Earth Hour is 8:30PM Saturday 28 March 2009 and is an environmental awareness event run by the WWF and the Air Raid Warden out of Dad’s Army.

The idea is that everyone turns their lights off for an hour to show support for action on climate change, 930 cities and towns in 80 countries have signed up and Birmingham is one of them. Unlike Sydney which is having a giant concert, Birmingham doesn’t seem to be doing anything â€” in fact I hear that it’s not even sure that the council will be able to turn any lights off.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

It’d be a bit sad if the combined brains of brum couldn’t do anything at all tho’, and James Rock has set up a Facebook group, please join and help organise.

Digital Challenge - Birmingham Big City Plan

Jon Bounds — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:00:18 EDT

Two flip min-video cameras are up for grabs in a competition to make a film about the Big City Plan. [link]

Kalooga

site admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:43:20 EDT

Kalooga is a new Dutch search-engine for images. Rather than searching for individual images, it only looks for coherent sets / collections of images on the topic. On a few test searches for broad terms like “bananas”, it seems useful and fast.

Nottingham Contemporary

site admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:10:29 EDT

News of yet another new contemporary art gallery for the East Midlands, this one trailing somewhat behind the bunch launched late last year. Nottingham Contemporary is apparently pitched as a “contemporary super-gallery”, and is due to open in Autumn 2009. Predictably it’s over budget, and is likely to open at a cost of Â£20-million.

Alternative Birmingham Landmarks for an open top bus tour

Jon Bounds — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:00:21 EDT

Ben says: "I'd like to put together a list of places around the city (preferably the city centre) that hold personal resonances for people who've visited Birmingham, people who live, work and play here. And once I've got a list of places and visited them to vet the stories I'd like to conduct a walking tour."

So go help fill this marvellous psychogeographical tour. [link]

No screws missing

Jon Bounds — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 04:45:38 EDT

The Flatpack festival properly launches this evening (Wednesday) with a Curzonora extravaganza at the Town Hall. I’ll let the programme explain:

“Birmingham, 1901. Electric trams are making their debut on the Bristol Road, councillors are plotting to bring water all the way from Wales, and at the Curzon Hall in Suffolk Street a showman named Waller Jeffs has just begun his first season of animated pictures in the city. Two shows a day, with as many as 3,000 punters per show marvelling at scenes of comedy and romance, the exotic and the mundane, accompanied by live music, sound-effects and performing animals. Within ten years he will be a Birmingham institution, but the audiences who have discovered film at â€˜Curzonoraâ€™ will desert him as full-time cinemas arrive on the scene.”

Flatpack Festival 09 trailer from Dave Gaskarth on Vimeo.

Flatpack Festival installation trail

Kate Spragg — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:07:15 EDT

Last Thursday I joined a rowdy bunch of art buffs, film lovers and the Flatpack devotees on the Flatpack Festival installation trail. The trail started at 5.30pm at Urban Outfitters with an introduction from Flatpack director Pip and representatives from the Universities involved in the project. The festival starts tomorrow with â€˜Curzonoraâ€™ at Town Hall, and the trail runs until 15 March.

The quality of the student work produced went beyond my expectations, which shows when students are given the opportunity to show work outside of University buildings and away from cosy degree shows things can get very exciting for both artist and art lover. I know when I was on a Fine Art degree course I thrived on finding unusal sites to exhibit my work and my practice was all the better for it.

I think it is easy to underestimate how much it means to students when they get asked to participate is such projects and how much they can get out of it. I commend Ian and Pip at Flatpack, and the Universities for taking the time to put this together as I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Following on with my latest obsession with maps, I have put together the installation trail as a Google map with photographs and links to videos I took of the artists introducing the work on the launch night:

View Larger Map

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Post tags: flatpack festival

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Arts Council England, West Midlands to be abolished

site admin — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:50:11 EDT

It seems that it’s goodbye to Arts Council England, West Midlands, as the nation hobbles joyously toward the 2012 Olympics. According to The Stage and other reports, it will be merged into a far larger Arts Council region that will cover “the Midlands and South-West” — that’s coast-to-coast from Land’s End across to the Lincolnshire Wash — with the change accompanied by large staff cuts. And it’ll probably get a trendy new name like Arts Council : The Big Stretch. Ok, I made up that last bit.

But it seems individual artists in the Midlands will only have one national point of contact after 2010, and it won’t even be in the Midlands or the South West. Since there will be only… ” a centralised Grants for the Arts team, based in Manchester”, serving the whole of England. Once again, it seems Birmingham has lost out, re: arts/media relocations. Surely Birmingham might have been a better choice to locate this office, re: the implicit need that the Arts Council has for artists to do a face-to-face with officials before applying, and the travel-time to/from the rest of the UK? Unless the Arts Council finally gets to grips with digital media and starts doing online video interviews, some individual artists may find they’re spending almost as much on the rail-fare/hotel than they’re likely to get in a small grant.

Nigel Shadbolt talks about Web Science, the Semantic Web, Linked Data, and Garlik

Paul Miller — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:26:17 EDT

In my latest podcast I talk with Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Southampton. We discuss Nigel’s background in Artificial Intelligence, and the appeal of the Semantic Web, before turning to explore the introduction of Linked Data to an enterprise audience and the multidisciplinary focus required to carry the Web forward.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

Academic Institution Internal Structure Ontology (AIISO)
Advanced Knowledge Technologies Project
Cambridge Consultants
DBpedia
DSpace
Egg
Epistemics
ePrints
FirstDirect
Garlik
Wendy Hall, and our recent podcast
Mike Harris
Tom Ilube
Linked Data
Mosaic
QDOS
Scientific American, and its 2001 Semantic Web article
SPARQL
University of Edinburgh
University of Nottingham
University of Southampton
VoCamp
Web Science Research Initiative

This conversation was recorded on Tuesday 10 March, 2009.

For other Talis podcasts in this Nodalities series, see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.

ArtsFest registrations open

site admin — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:49:06 EDT

Birmingham ArtsFest registrations are now open, should you want to be part of the programme.

And talking of deadlines — the Big City Plan has a gong ready to award to local amateur photographers. Deadline: 20th April 09. Interestingly, they request that you have proof that all people who appear in your photographs gave their consent, even though the law on street photography does not require that.

Appistry co-founders talk about CloudIQ and Cloud Computing

Paul Miller — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:32:34 EDT

In my latest podcast I talk with two of Appistry’s co-founders; Chief Architect Michael Groner and Chief Strategist Bob Lozano. We discuss definitions of Cloud Computing, and explore some of the wider issues that Appistry sets out to address with their products and approach.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

This conversation was recorded on Wednesday 4 March, 2009.

For other Talis podcasts in this Nodalities series, see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.

Some photos

Pete Ashton — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 18:36:18 EDT

Something I intend to do a lot more of this year is take more photos. I kinda stopped last year as things got a bit crazy and I realised recently I need that outlet. So here’s a few from the last couple of months that I’m rather pleased with.

The Winter League playing at a Capsule gig:

Johny Doom and Lisa Meyer at Home of Metal:

Shoes at a gig run by Colour:

Katie Spragg on the door at said Colour gig:

Nick Booth in the pub on a Saturday afternoon:

Part of my Take More Photos plan is to go to more Flickrmeets this year and participate with the Flcikr communities more but also to be more selective with my photos. Since I tended to only be shooting larg-ish events and gigs last year I developed the habit of dumping 50 or 100 shots online with little or no commentary of context. That needs to stop. Little and often and better.

Woo hoo! CiB has a new look!

Kate Spragg — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 14:09:58 EDT

You may of noticed that CiB has looked a bit weird over the last week, this is because I have been tinkering with the site, removing bits and testing this lovely new theme out.

I have decided to strip alot of the features out as they were not updating properly or just not working full stop. I will be adding new bits and bobs and as I mentioned before introducing a big CiB Google Map.

I have installed a new advertising plugin which will make buying adverts on CiB easy peasy and will hopefully be non offensive to your creative eyes. I will be adding prices etc for this very soon.

So, I hope you like the new theme and please bear with me whist I tinker further to get it just right over the next week.

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Make a film for the big city plan.

Nick Booth — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 13:59:32 EDT

I’ve just received an e-mail from Richard Rees at the city council encouraging me to mention the digital challenge which the council is throwing out for anyone who wants to contribute more to the big city plan process. Thanks for prompting me to do this, I meant to write something when the competition launched last month.

The council want you to use video or still photography to express your opinions about the plan.Â You can win a flip camera. It’s a great idea and I would encourage you to use any combination of video, still and or audio to show what you want changing in the city centre.Â How about a two minute world wind tour of your neighbourhood?

Sadly I can’t enter because the rules appear to prohibit people who are professional image makers from doing so.

If you want to take photos or make a short film then the closing date is April 20th and the rules are here.Â If you want to read the big city plan (work in progress)Â as the council expresses it please go here, if you would also like to look at a plainer English version please go here.

Some of you may know I took part in creating a plain English translation of the plan for the bigcitytalk site. It was mentioned as an example of the future of consultation (link to mentions of Birmingham) in the Cabinet Office sponsored Power of Information Report:

The original Power of Information report was one of the first to be re-worked and presented on CommentOnThis as an experiment.Â CommentOnThis was an early innovator in reworking government consultation documents online so that they can be used more easily.Â Â More recently a team of civic bloggers in Birmingham has translated and re-purposed Birminghamâ€™s â€˜Big City Planâ€™ on the web in Big City Plan Talk.

These technical developments could improve the effectiveness of policy development in consultation, but will require new skills amongst policy makers and communicators.Â A plan for supporting the change needed in policy development skills should be developed by Government Skills by end 2009, with a concomitant training plan from the National School for Government.

The big city talk site saw a conversation emerge involving 274 comments.Â Not sure how those comments have accounted for in the consultation report itself. The council tells us:

All attributable comments submitted to date have now been processed on our consultation database and are visible to all. As of 4 March, a total of 1,864 comments from a total of 273 contributors have been logged as follows:

Directly into the consultation portal:Â 719

Via e-mail:Â 679

Post 409

Other 57

I’m imagining big city talk would best be covered by other? What do you think?

Stoke Your Fires 09

site admin — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 13:17:58 EDT

Coming up soon, the Stoke Your Fires animation festival in Stoke-on-Trent. I can’t copy and paste an info-quote here, since the site’s done in Flash — but the dates are 2nd-3rd April 09.

Outdated music industry deserves no Govt help

Mon, 9 Mar 2009 11:06:05 EDT

Outdated music industry deserves no Govt help - Great overview of the current tactics used by the music recording industry to shore up their failing business models which asks the obvious question:

Where's the government help for travel agents, directory publishers, local newspapers, hard-core pornographers and other industries whose entire business models are disappearing thanks to online competition, legal or otherwise? What's so special about music?

via Dubber, natch

The Rubbish Superheroes of Birmingham

Mon, 9 Mar 2009 11:05:56 EDT

The Rubbish Superheroes of Birmingham - Eye on Moseley has been gathering evidence from the Birmingham Mail of a breed of sub-standard beings with special powers living amongst us. Keep an eye out for Amazing Man, Bone Boy, Death Charge Mum, Crucifixion Man and, most intriguing, Tragic Cop.

Spot the difference

dom.murphy@taktak.net (Dom Murphy) — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 10:44:39 EDT

This isn't the first time we've seen a site very similar to Visual. We'll take this as a compliment, even though it is a steal!

The O2 blackout zone of Moseley

Pete Ashton — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 08:51:18 EDT

If you have a mobile phone on the O2 network and you frequently travel through Moseley in Birmingham, as I do, you’ll have noticed the complete and utter lack of service along Alcester Road between, roughly, Tudor Road and Park Hill (or, if you prefer pubs as landmarks, The Cross and The Jug). This isn’t due to some magnetic anomaly or witchcraft as other mobile coms providers have masts there as shown on the Big Ofcom Cancer Danger Map:

I first noticed this a little under 18 months ago when I got me an iPhone and became tied to the wonderful world of O2 and figured it was an glitch that they would sort out soon. But they haven’t and while it’s not critical (and I quite like being forced off the network when I occasionally go for a drink there) it’s certainly not ideal. And, given Moseley’s somewhat Barley-esque meejawanker demographic (of which I am a part albeit in the Kings Heath brigade) one would suspect the uptake of iPhone has been rather significant in the area.

Very cursory research (ie asking Twitter) implies there was some planning permission cockup which isn’t surprising given the “oh no you don’t” nature of the various Moseley preservation societies (who, I should add, I have plenty of time for, particularly their lovely campaign to reintroduce sandstone garden walls which appeals to my sense of passion and scale) but surely a compromise must be possible. The other operators seem to have figured it out and I hear you can do some very subtle things with phone masts these days.

I guess we should do a poll. Who finds the O2 dead zone rather irritable and would like to see it filled up with radio signals?

The Big Paws - Rhubarb Radio 7/3

Jon Bounds — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 05:37:16 EDT

Myself and Jules had a lot of fun on the interweb radio on Saturday morning. You can listen again to two hours of music and stuff, including: a rude joke about Scroobius Pip, sweary news, and the brass section:

All stuff about the show is at thebigpaws.co.uk - including the tracklisting and all the things we talked about.

Tune in again next week on Rhubarb Radio.com Saturday’s 8am - 10am or listen again.

Links for 2009-03-08 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 9 Mar 2009 04:00:00 EDT

Linux tips every geek should know

Back at its HP source?

Jon Bounds — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 03:56:57 EDT

BBC WM breakfast presenter Phil Upton kept hold of the big HP Sauce sign when the building was demolished (following Heinz’s lies and betrayal).

Since then it’s been in the museum’s warehouse â€” but now Phil is asking where it should go. The options:

on display at the old site in Aston,
in an exhibition at the refurbed Aston Hall
OR somewhere else..

I can’t see the Aston Hall connection (exciting that it’ll be properly re-opened this summer tho’), so it’s the site for me â€” unless anyone can thing of anywhere better?

You can tell Phil what you think by email, or even give him a tweet.

Photo by Brett Wilde

Eee rotate

site admin — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 03:05:59 EDT

A little free app called Eee Rotate v.1.1. Now I can use my Asus Eee mini-laptop screen as a Kindle-like “upright” ebook reader, by rotating the screen display, something that many cheap laptops don’t enable.

Interestingly, I find that Google can now search for MS Reader ebook files (.lit) by using filetype:lit as a search modifier. Although there don’t seem to be many free-range .lit ebooks out there — and it’s mostly fiction, techie tomes, and torrents. Poor old .lit, it never really seemed to take off, killed by the ubuquity of .pdf (MS Reader can’t open .pdf), and the inevitable hacking of the DRM.

Which is a pity, since I find that even the latest Flash-based attempt at a software ebook reader from Adobe doesn’t seem as likable as the old Microsoft Reader with ClearType.

It seems to me that the market is still wide open for an elegant “opens any format” Open Source eBook reader software application. Something that works with .pdf, .lit, .cbr, and the formats used by the Internet Archive books, possibly circumventing lawsuits by the use of third-party plugins. If anyone out there knows of such a reader, please comment.

The winner of the CiB design competition isâ€¦.

Kate Spragg — Sun, 8 Mar 2009 18:38:36 EDT

Drum roll please….Congratulations to Katie Parry of Supercool design who has won the Created in Birmingham design competition with this fantastic graphic map of Brum. The decision was made by myself and Kay at Cut-Out shop, and we thought the design was simple, beautifulÂ and fulfilled the brief to a T.

The design will be lovingly screenprinted by hand onto high quality t-shirts and canvas bags by up and coming DiY print shop Cut-Out who are based in the West Midlands. The items will be sold via Cut-Out and will be strictly limited edition. All profits made from the items will be donated in Acorn Children’s Hospice. I will be meeting with Kay to thrash out the details in the next week so I will let you know anymore details then.

Many thanks to everyone who has taken the time to enter the competition, there has been a smorgasbord of different styles submitted and every one of them was thoughtfully put together from the brief. I will post some of them up in the next few days.

© Kate Spragg for Created in Birmingham, 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CiB design competition, Katie Parry, Supercool design

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Wrong Format

site admin — Sun, 8 Mar 2009 08:52:26 EDT

Over in the East Midlands, Derby City Council has managed to further damage the creative reputation of the place — by censoring its own Format International Photography Festival. Luckily the British Journal of Photography is on the case, and has placed the censored work online.

Rights grabs

site admin — Sun, 8 Mar 2009 08:48:06 EDT

A new UK survey…

“…of more than 1,000 photographers, press agencies and picture libraries for the British Photographic Council found that 93% of photographers have come under pressure to hand over greater rights to clients for no increase in the fee, with 76% saying that their income has fallen as a result.”

Peter Donnelly

site admin — Sun, 8 Mar 2009 08:41:45 EDT

A short illustrated biography of Birmingham photographer Peter Donnelly (1932-2005), written by Dr. Carl Chinn.

And talking of photographers, a superb portrait of a Birmingham barber, by Sean Dooley…