By the way, to the person that has my copy of the book - I know it was a while ago now, but can I have it back please?

Here’s the best bit:

1. Know what you’re buying: Reporting is now so contaminated by bias and campaigning, and general mischief, that no reader can hope to get a picture of what is happening without first knowing who owns the paper, and who it is being published for.
2. Follow the names: If you find a reporter who seems to know the score, particularly in an area you know about, cherish him or her.
3. Register bias: Even when you read the same paper every day, be aware that reporters are now less embarrassed to let the bias show.
4. Read the second paragraph; and look for quote marks: Surprisingly often, the key fact is not in the first paragraph, which is general and designed to grab attention. Look for the hard fact in the next paragraph. If it seems soft and contentless, there is probably very little in the story.
5. If the headline asks a question, try answering ‘no’: Is This the True Face of Britain’s Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have we Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn’t have put the question mark in.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious and oversold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic.
6. And watch out for quotation marks in headlines, too: If you read ‘Marr “stole” book idea’ then the story says nothing of the kind. If quotation marks are signs of real reporting in the body of a story, in the headline they are often a sign of failed reporting.
7. Read small stories: Just because something is reported in a single paragraph does not mean it is insignificant.
8. Suspect ‘research’: Hundreds of dodgy academic departments put out bogus or trivial pieces of research designed to impress busy newspaper people and win themselves some cheap publicity which can in turn be used in their next funding applications. If something is a survey, see if the paper reports how many people were surveyed, where and when.
9. Check the calendar: Not simply for April’s Fool, but for the predictable round of hardy annuals that bulk up thin news lists. Anniversaries; stories about wettest/driest/longest/warmest spring/summer/autumn…
10. Suspect financial superlatives: Even if the underlying rate of inflation is modest, then in the ordinary way of things, prices for many limited good are going to be the highest ever. What is interesting is how these increases relate to inflation and therefore to other prices and to each other.
11. Remember that news is cruel: Reading the awful things that people apparently say about each other, or newspapers say about them, can be depressing. Is life really so writhing with distaste, failure and loathing? No.
12. Finally, believe nothing you read about newspaper sales—nothing: Work it out for yourself.

(half-inched from Sans Serif)

When Pete introduced me to the CiB readers he said that he’d lost interest in running the site to some extent and that the ideas for taking CiB forward were “kinda complex and needed some serious planning”.  Someone else (that’d be me) would run the site for six months while that took place.

I took over in May this year.  At the end of October six months will have whizzed by.  Now, I’ve still got plenty of enthusiasm for the site, although I’m starting to feel the demands it makes on my time now that I have a run of other (possibly kinda related) projects stacking up.

So here’s the conclusion I’ve come to (for now at least, conclusion correct at time of writing) - I’ll probably pass on the baton in the new year, using January 2009 as a transitional month as it should be pretty quiet then.

Who will take over though?  Hmm, that’s the question.

I’ve got more time to think about it than Pete did, so some criteria is slowly forming in my noggin.  This isn’t set in stone by any means but I reckon the person taking over should be:

• comfortable with blogging and (if you’ll excuse the buzzword) social media generally.
• on the fringes of Birmingham’s art scene (if a part of it at all).  A narky commenter once described CiB as ‘the blind leading the blind’.  Erm… well yes, that’s kinda the point.  It’s meant to be someone feeling their way into the nooks and crannies of Birmingham’s creative scene.
• not putting lots of time into a good blog already.  CiB is meant to help foster blogging around Birmingham, not nick the people writing the good ones
• time rich.  There’s so much more that could be done with CiB (heck knows the ideas and opportunities are out there) but it takes time to keep on top of 400 or so RSS feeds and however many emails arrive daily.  It’s not really compatible with a regular day job (I work evenings and weekends a lot).
• friendly.  Of course.
• new to CiB, who hasn’t done anything on the site before.

Should I add anything to that list?  Or should I stop thinking about it so hard?

The problem is that list strikes off every good person who comes to mind.  Still, someone will pop up and be perfect for it, I’m sure.  There’s plenty of time between now and January to find them.

Anyway, the idea of this post was to get my thoughts in order more than anything - it’s NOT an invitation for applicants to put themselves forward so please don’t treat it as one (and certainly don’t email me about it unless you want the email copy/pasted into the comments below).  If you’re interested then the best thing would be for you to be blogging regularly and ‘well’, not that I’m a judge of that or anything.

I gather that my involvement was part of a proof of concept - seeing what it was like to have bloggers involved in documenting what goes on behind the scenes.  Essentially I’d been brought along to blog, tweet, photo and video lots and was given pretty much unfettered access to do so.  There are worse ways to spend a Friday.

Anyway, I met up with @benrmatthews (who was doing remarkably well considering he’d been hosting 200 or so Twitterers at the inaugral Twestival the night before) and @drewb and we were ushered into a strange world of horses, wrestlers, bands, dancers and all sorts of other weird and wonderful things.

There’s no point me describing what went on because I was documenting things as I went along.  So, for a flavour of the day here are my tweets (to be read from the bottom up):

Here are my photos (there are more from Ben and Drew - we tagged everything o2bloggers):

And here are a couple of videos I streamed (and recorded) live using Bambuser, a nice little service that I’d all but forgotten about.  Please bear in mind that these couldn’t have been any more spur of the moment so there’s no incisive questioning or anything.  The first is with Ed from O2 who explained what the ad is for:

The second is with JP, O2’s Digital Communications Manager - the guy who monitors the internet and responds to O2-related problems, queries, etc that people might have:

Some other stuff from the day, bulletpoint-style:

• We got a tour of the building from the events manager which was pretty sweet - they don’t usually do tours.
• Drew, Ben and I were initially the subject of 5 mins of curiosity.  Sample question - “Blogging… why?” Actually that was as deep as the conversation went.
• Actually, saying that, one of the stylists was talking about getting some sort of website together so I spent a couple of minutes setting up a blog here - Lucy Harvey.  I showed her what some companies around Birmingham are using blogs for which impressed her so I’m hoping she makes some use of it.
• The editor was Joe Guest.  I wish I’d chatted with him more because he worked on the Cadbury’s Gorilla ad as well as music videos for U2, The Streets, Kasabian and Dirty Vegas.  He looked kinda busy though.
• I got the distinct impression that if this wrestler didn’t want me to exist it wouldn’t take him much to snuff me out.  Dude was huge.
• The O2’s (v swish) VIP bar is going to be the venue for a hack day sometime in October.  More info on that to come.

Anyway, it was a good day.  I got to poke around the venue and saw some things you certainly don’t see every day.  It was fun to really put Bambuser, Flickr and Twitter to work for a few solid hours, even if the best lesson I learnt was about how quickly an iPhone’s battery can be used up.

I also enjoyed meeting the guys from Hotwire and am hoping to keep in touch, especially as some of Ben’s side-projects (the Twestival meet-up and Bright One, a PR company for charities and such) might maybe have some overlap with some of my own.

This is no occasional kickabout we’re talking about.  The AtisReal 7-a-side league (now there’s a website that needs updating) has been going for the past 10 years and every Tues and Thurs (ok, not over the summer) 6 fixtures take place.

Except this week.  The first batch of fixtures were halfway through when two 11-a-side teams turned up and, after some arguing, the 7-a-siders were told to do one.

To summarise

Someone at the Hadley Stadium somehow managed to forget about a league that has provided a steady stream of income for the past 10 years on the same days and at the same times.

It was the regular, loyal customers who were told to piss off.

Those previously loyal (now very pissed off) customers outnumbered the strange newcomers by about four to one:

• 2 teams of 11 = 22 (plus subs)
• 12 teams of 7 = 84 (plus subs)

There might’ve been a compelling reason for pissing off as many customers as possible.  I’d love to hear what that reason was (in the comments please).  However, until I find that out I’m left with this…

My conclusion

There are idiots at the Hadley Stadium in Bearwood.

**UPDATE** The manager of the stadium has sent unreserved apologies and arrangements have been made to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

The Tory Conference

This is a funny one.  PR Week’s main story is about Labour & Tory plans to ‘dominate the blogosphere’:

it emerges the Conservative Party is trialling a local blogger charm offensive at its annual conference in Birmingham next week.

Head of new media Rishi Saha has worked with regional organisation Screen West Midlands to identify ten influential bloggers in the area, who have been given free VIP passes to the conference.

Caroline Spelman, Conservative Party chairman, told PRWeek: ‘As a West Midlands MP I am delighted to be engaging with leading voices in Birmingham’s new media.’

Which, slightly hilariously, makes me an influential blogger (thanks CiB) although I can’t remember ever mentioning politics in a post and there have been a lot since I took over in May.  Mark Hanson at the PR Media Blog has picked up on this and suggests that:

What’s fascinating here is that they have chosen non-political blogs to take part in this. The guests are blogging in the arts, culture and entertainment spheres. The aim is to build a groundswell of support amongst general opinion formers who may be persuaded to engage and debate Tory policies as opposed to rabidly backing or attacking.

Interesting.  I particularly like this:

The danger is that the bemused bloggers are hurded into a backroom in Birmingham for tea and buscuits, have an awkward Q&A with a bemused shadow cabinet member and then having ticked a box forget all about it

Anyway, we’ll see how that one pans out.

The O2 Arena

The invite to the O2 Arena was a surprising one.  I guess I might have popped up on their radar when I covered the Unlit thing the other week.  All I know about that one is that there’ll be some unsigned bands and some ’spectacular acts’ to give a flavour of the sort of thing that happens at the big tent in Greenwich.  I’m allowed to Tweet, take photos and blog whatever I like so expect some of that in the next day or so.

Incidentally, my initial wariness over the approach from the PR guy was tempered by the person in question being Ben Matthews, one of the organisers of tonight’s Twestival (an event what has got me thinking interesting thoughts).

• AdSense Manager
• Akismet
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• cformsII - contact form
• FeedSmith
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• Wordpress Reports
• WP-o-matic

I grabbed most of these by trawling through the most popular ones on wordpress.org and the rest have been recommended by various people over time.  I’ve also added a couple recently and thanks for that go to Paul Bradshaw for this tweet and his delicous taggings and also Joanna Geary for this recent blog post.

Are there any that I’ve missed that’ll reinvigorate my life and have me earning MILLIONS from the internet TODAY with NO EXTRA WORK?

The set-up was a big tent in the back garden; nicely lit with a small crowd of people already gathered and three acts to entertain us.  Jont was hosting - he’s been organising Unlit gigs for the past 10 years or so.

First up were The Old Dance School who threatened to be a bit fiddly-dee but were actually a lot of fun.  Birmingham/based too, I think.

I might nearly have seen them at the Moseley Folk Festival this year but I’ve a funny feeling we were drying off in the pub at that point.  Anyway, they were good and I filmed a bit of them:

Next up was Bust My Flex, a guy with a guitar who sang scatty, odd songs - almost blues pastiches - and the odd instrumental.  I liked the way that he put his whole body into playing his guitar and sounded nothing like you’d expect from looking at him.  Here he is (the pic’s by Bobbie, by the way):

The third act was poet and occasional ukelele player, Tim Clare. He was a lot of fun, with his first poem the cleverly obscene ‘Gay Day’. It’s up on his MySpace and worth checking out although it was delivered much better live.

I wasn’t so keen on the second poem but the third and final one was a funny little gem. Again, the Sound of Music-inspired ‘Favourite Things’ is on Tim’s MySpace but here’s my video of part of it:

We sloped off after that, although the party looked like it was going to carry on.  Btw, here are the rest of my pics.

The Unlit chaps were streaming video with Qik on the night but the bits that I’ve seen were dreadful (mainly shots of Jo and Frankie’s backs).  They were filming with other cameras too and I expect that’ll be edited and uploaded soonish.

Actually, the social media side was pretty interesting (err… to me).  They’re blogging often, Twittering (although to a handful of people and they’re not following anyone back - shoutcasting rather than chatting, then) and are upping pics to Flickr and vid to YouTube.

It’s got me thinking dangerous thoughts though.  Sure, I’ve got Film Dash to sort out, but a few little impromptu gigs?  How hard can it be?  It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, especially after coming across Welcome to our TV Show a little while back.  Hmm…

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

I write a lot of blog posts every week and it’s nice when someone leaves a comment - whether it’s someone agreeing, disagreeing, adding their own info or correcting my latest balls-up over Capsule’s listings.

It starts at home though, doesn’t it?  Do unto others and all that.

So I’ve been making more of an effort to comment on other blogs.  Taking that a bit further, what I’d like to do is have a weekly round-up of blog posts that I’ve commented on generated automatically.  Kind of like the link-posts that many people do but slightly different.

I’ve been trying to find the best way to do that:

• Turns out Backtype isn’t anywhere near useful enough
• A fall-back option is to tag posts with Delicious and use the Postalicious plugin to round them up
• But I’ve decided to give the comment-tracking service co.mments a spin and find a way to use the RSS feed it produces to generate a weekly round-up of the posts I comment on. Easy

Although if anyone has any better ideas for how to do it then I’d be pleased to hear them.  Otherwise, hold tight for the first thrilling instalment.

**Update** - co.mments seems to have gone down so I’ve switched to coComment who I originally discounted cos they looked like they were trying to do too much.  Still, as long as they function, eh?

Still no joy automatically compiling the weekly round-up.  I’ll get there…

I was chatting to Carl from Made Media a couple of weeks ago.  He makes short films from time to time and aparrently, when he was living in Sheffield, he took part in a few little competitions - 24 hours to make a short film, 48 hours to make a short film, 2 weeks to make a music vid with a local band, that sort of thing.

He was lamenting the lack of opportunity to do something similar in Birmingham.  I agreed that there should be something similar here.  In fact I agreed so much that I impulsively offered to organise something myself.

Hmm.

I was thinking that, since taking over Created in Birmingham, I’ve met quite a few people who I reckon would be interested in taking part.  It needn’t take too much to organise (famous last words) and the pressure for everything to be perfect would be off as long as you made it clear that it was being organised out of the goodness of your heart.

So Film Dash was born - a 48-hour film challenge happening the weekend of 18/19 October.

That’ll give me 6 weeks to get everything set up - soon enough to concentrate my mind: enough time for others to get themselves ready.

Very few of the details are together at this stage.  Venues, rules, prizes(?) and all sorts of other things haven’t been sorted.  The idea is to put the idea out there and bring everything together as we get nearer the event (although sooner rather than later).

At this stage I’m doing this entirely independently with no input from anyone else.  I’m happy to bear the organisational weight but some sponsorship from someone - maybe a prize or two - would improve things.

I’ll think about that later.  For now the next job is to get the word out and try and get some more people interested in taking part.

If you know anyone who’d be up for getting involved then please push them towards the Film Dash blog.