My seven links (and five blogs)

Nick Booth has tagged me in one of those posts where you answer a bunch of questions and pass the honour on to a few others. The acceptable(ish) face of chain letters, if you like. This one’s called My 7 Links.

Nick says it’s not the kind of thing he’d usually do and the same goes for me, but I’m game for something a bit different.

It’s a bit tricky for me though. This blog is my natural home for a post like this, but it isn’t the place I do most of my blogging. That would be CiB or one of several other places. Still, I’ve had a go…

1. Your most beautiful post

Advice. Not a great start – I’m not sure about this category and wouldn’t describe any of my blogging here as particularly ‘beautiful’. There’s something very lovely about this quote from David Attenborough though.

To digress slightly, one of the lovely things about running an arts and culture blog is that sometimes I’ll scan down the homepage of Created in Birmingham and I’ll be pleased with how pretty it looks. Occasionally I’ll post particular images for no other reason than they go well with the site’s theme. Don’t tell anyone that though.

2. Your most popular post

How to promote your night/gig/event online. The most popular thing on this blog by an absolute country mile. Not sure why – reasonably useful content with decent SEO, maybe.

3. Your most controversial post

Recommended BCC arts cuts (possibly). Had to go for one over on CiB. I’ve discovered that controversy creates an off-putting amount of admin so I don’t really go in for it all that much (not on purpose, at least). I knew this one would rouse a few passions but it needed to be posted so I was just very careful about what I said and kept an eye on the comments to make sure nobody got too carried away (which they didn’t). It’s at times like these when the difference between being a blogger and a journalist is most keenly felt.

4. Your most helpful post

My standard changes to a free WordPress.com blog. It’s a bit dated now, what with the changes to WordPress that have been made since, but it still stands up as a useful checklist. It gets linked to a fair amount and was even updated and reposted by Talk About Local.

5. A post whose success surprised you

That video of me with the cyclist. Stretching things a bit here – this is a post about something surprisingly successful.

6. A post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved

Blogger-in-residence. Maybe. It’s not that it deserved more attention so much, just that it’s a good idea (not necessarily an original one) that I haven’t seen implemented very well yet. Or at least not very widely – there are scattered examples out there. The Australia Council for the Arts’s Geek in Residence scheme looks good though.

7. The post I am most proud of

Created in Birmingham: Best UK Blog 2008. It’s not the award itself that I’m proud of, it’s the blog post thanking everyone for helping out. I did my best to credit everyone who helped to promote CiB over the two-week voting period. It took me absolutely ages to do – tracking mentions/tweets/etc over two weeks, writing the post and inserting all those links – and was entirely worth every second of effort. I wrote a bit more about that post here.

Five Blogs

I subscribe to a few hundred blogs – some because I have to and some for the fun of it. Rather than search for the ones I might consider the best I’ve just picked five good ones that caught my eye when scanning my feeds.

I’m not going to nominate these people to continue this meme (unless they feel the urge to do so), but I’m going to recommend you go and at least check them out.

  1. There are a lot of great photographers out there and many of them have blogs. I especially like Steve Gerrard‘s
  2. What came first, the dating site or the person who wanted an excuse to crunch lots of data to find out interesting and quirky things about people? Probably the dating site but, either way, OkTrends is great
  3. In a similar vein, it is possible to write gleefully (and usefully) about web analytics, as Avinash Kaushik proves
  4. See Illuminations’ blog for keenness in the area of arts, film and filming the arts. A trend is emerging here – I like blogs that are chock-full of enthusiasm. The writing and subject matter aren’t quite so important (although I probably wouldn’t recommend anything that doesn’t meet a certain standard).
  5. Finally, Stan’s Cafe. A fantastic theatre company and their blog is exactly as informative, imaginative and to the point as you could want it to be.

Published by Chris Unitt

I work at One Further, doing digital projects with cultural organisations. Follow @ChrisUnitt or find me on LinkedIn.