Talking about Created in Birmingham with Carl Chinn

On Sunday I was back on BBC WM again, this time with Kate Spragg to talk about Created in Birmingham, its success in the Weblog Awards and the creative scene in Birmingham generally.

Carl was an engaging host and quickly grasped that the most important thing the site tries to do, beyond publishing bits of news and info, is link together the various communities around the creative sector.

I managed to get in plugs for 7 Inch Cinema, the Flatpack Festival and Capsule as well as the Social Media Surgeries organised by Nick Booth. Possibly others too, I forget.

I quite enjoyed the experience and, unlike my last appearance, I didn’t feel the slightest bit nervous and managed to keep my umms and ahhs to a minimum. I think. I haven’t listened back to it yet. For anyone who missed it and fancies a listen it’s available on the iPlayer until Sunday 22 Feb.

Here’s the obligatory photo of myself, Carl and Kate:

Big thanks to Carl Chinn for having us and for Lyle Bignon for arranging it.

Plugging CiB on BBC WM

This morning I was interviewed by the very nice Phil Upton on BBC WM’s breakfast show. I was there to talk about Created in Birmingham’s feat in winning the award of Best UK Blog 2008.

You can listen again here (I’m on at around 2 hours 20 mins) and, as soon as my audio player plugin starts behaving, I’ll insert the 5 minute snippet with me below. Actually, in the meantime you can download it here.

I’d just like to say thanks to Phil and his team for making me feel comfortable (I’ve not done much radio at all) and to Lyle Bignon for sorting it in the first place.

How to write a ‘thank you’ post (or a collective memory)

As you may have heard the blog I run, Created in Birmingham, won the award of Best UK Blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards.

As well as being pretty pleased with the outcome I also found the whole thing fascinating. I’ve got a list of blog posts I’d like to spin off but I thought I’d start with something that only ocurred to me because of this tweet from @anne_brand:

Anne (who I’ve never met) is linking to this thank you post on Created in Birmingham in which I thanked the usual people, mentioned one of the other blogs that I thought was particularly worthy of attention and listed everyone who had given their support online.

I’m guessing her tweet referred to the list of supporters, which ended up being rather long. Over 200 individual Twitter users mentioned CiB, as did 80-ish blogs/forum posts/organisations/etc. Keeping track of them all and compiling a post with links cost me a few hours sleep and a little piece of my sanity. It was important to do it though.

Why do it?

Here’s the thing – it didn’t occur to me to not do it. CiB won the award thanks to the efforts of the community around the site. It’s only right to thank everyone and the way to do that in internet-land is to link to them. So that’s what I did.  It took ages keeping track of everything and writing it up but it’s such a small price to pay really.

I have previous in this regard though – I did a similar job after the 2008 Supersonic Festival and Birmingham Opera Company’s ‘King Idomeo’. These ‘collective memories’ end up being an interesting document of who said what and I’ve always meant to write up how I go about collecting all the links.

How to do it

Twitter

I discovered the tweets using Twitter searches of the following keywords – ‘Created in Birmingham’ CiB’ ‘#votecib’ and ‘http://tinyurl.com/9m6mwl’. By way of explanation:

• #votecib is a ‘hashtag’ – a unique identifier to attach to a message on Twitter. Messages on a similar subject can then be more easily found with a search (as long as people use the tag).
• http://tinyurl.com/9m6mwl is a shortened URL which stands in place of a longer one – when you’ve only got 140 characters to use in a message, characters are at a premium
  

To track these in real time, and respond with a thanks if/when necessary, I used Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is a desktop-based Twitter client (that is to say it’s a little programme that you can use for reading your Tweets) which has a large panel display and allows separate panes for searches. It’s a bit industrial-strength as Twitter clients go but it doesn’t half get the job done. Heres what it looks like (click to enlarge):

It’s not quite as scary as it looks but it was a bit of a distraction. Whenever someone tweeted using one of those search terms I recorded their name in a text document I kept handy. That’s all there was to it.

The other links

I did a Google blog search and sorted results by date to see if anything relevant had been posted. I did that fairly regularly to keep up with any ongoing conversations and to see who was talking about us. I bolstered this with the odd search on Twingly and Icerocket too.

It can be quite hard to search for a post or comment left in a forum but I tried Boardreader, Boardtracker, and Omgili. The results were better than nothing, but only just.

At the end of the voting process I did a couple of regular Google searches (mainly combinations of the keywords ‘CiB’, ‘Created in Birmingham’, ‘ Best UK Blog’, ‘Weblog Awards’ and ‘vote’). Working up to page 20 of the results I came across a few new items.

Again, I recorded the URLs of any blogs I found in a text doc to be written up later.

Simplifying the process

A couple of things I could’ve (should’ve) used to lighten the load:

• Google Alerts (searches of blogs, news, the web, video and groups) delivered by email or RSS – there was really no need to keep searching when I could’ve just taken a sec to set this up and waited for the updates to roll in
• Social Media Firehose – a Yahoo Pipe that searches a swathe of sites and presents the results saving you the legwork

If I was monitoring these terms for longer than a week I’d have set these up straight away.

Any help?

This sort of thing can be applied to whatever you’re interested in. It would make sense (and is not at all egotistic) to have some sort of automated search set up for your name, although bad luck if your name is John Smith. Ditto for your company name and any topics of particular interest.

However, I’m sure there are easier and more comprehensive tools/techniques that I’m not yet aware of. Any suggestions would be welcome.

Handing on Created in Birmingham

As I said in this interview with Localmouth, I put my involvement in CiB down to being in the right place at the right time and count my lucky stars for that.

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.

Surface Unsigned Festival’s PR Idiocy

Back in March of this year, Danny Smith wrote about Surface Unsigned, a battle of the bands kinda thing, on Created In Birmingham. His fairly innocent post has provoked a bit of fuss over the past couple of days. Here’s the story in a nutshell:

1. On 18 March, Danny posts about Surface Unsigned.
2. CiB regulars diss Surface Unsigned in the comments. Danny defends Surface Unsigned.
3. Danny comes back from the gig and, having done a bit of digging into the Surface Unsigned business model, reports that some aspects of the Surface Unsigned business model aren’t to his liking. On 20 March he quotes a single paragraph from the info pack Surface Unsigned give to bands.
4. Danny reiterates that he had a good time and that, from a punter’s point of view, it was good value for money.
5. Two months later, on 15 May, Surface Unsigned Festival Limited send Danny a letter threatening prosecution if the post is not taken down by 22 May.

You can see the email on Pete Ashton’s blog along with a bit more detail on the events. To my mind his analysis is spot on but I’d like to add a few extra thoughts of my own.

• There’s no copyright infringement. Danny didn’t quote a whole or substantial part of the information pack and if you tell me that the market value of that document was diminished by Danny’s post I will laugh at you, and you won’t like that. If anything it could almost be a confidentiality matter, but frankly that’s just grasping at straws.
• Surface Unsigned don’t just want the ‘offending’ paragraph removed, they want the whole post deleted. Their ‘copyright infringement solicitors’ would do well to find a court willing to order that. Makes me think it’s Danny’s digging in the rest of the post they’re worried about, not just their T&Cs.
• If Surface Unsigned had asked nicely then there’s a much better chance that a paragraph on a long-forgotten post would have been removed/paraphrased as a courtesy. Oh, but I forget – it’s the rest of the post they’re concerned about.
• As Danny said in the inital post ‘Surface don’t seem to do any promotion’. With PR pratfalls like this you can see why.

So what have we at Created In Birmingham done? Well, we’ve left the post up, obviously – we’re not going to stand for being bullied. As a compromise Pete’s gone and rewritten the post in LOLspeak (yes, I know translation of copywritten works is unauthorised, you’re missing the funny).

As Pete points out, the real problem for Surface Unsigned is to do with Google search results. In particular people linking to the original CiB post and using Surface Unsigned as the anchor text like I have here – Surface Unsigned.

It’d be interesting to hear what you, your friends and maybe even your forum buddies think about this whole thing.  Link back to the ‘offending’ blog post and chances are I’ll notice and give you a mention on CiB on Thursday.