Monday evening was spent at Light House in Wolverhampton. There was an event on – one of their Out of Hours networking things along the lines of the blogging event I was part of last month – but I was really there to snarf the wifi and buzz off the creative vibe of the place as I worked. I got chatting to Holly, proprietor of the sadly deceased Sheila Cooke Foundation – a neat little artists shop in Wolves which functioned as a focal point for the local arts and crafts community. Closure was forced by financial realities but it’s best to be philosophical about such things. She gave it a go and good stuff came from it – that’s what really matters.

Naturally, since I was involved in the conversation, we got talking about blogging. She’d struck me as a perfect candidate to blog about the local scene since she’s an active part of it and, though the shop, is in a position where she knows who’s who and what they’re doing. She also has her own jewellery business selling in shops around the world so there’s a personal need to get stuff out there. So I did what I usually do, whipped out the laptop and demonstrated how blindingly simple setting up a blog on Wordpress.com is and she was pretty sold on the idea. Result.

Cycling back from New St my brain started whirring. Aside from my day jobs blogging on Created in Birmingham and running the Custard Factory site (still in development – watch this space), this is what I do now. I’m, for want a of a better phrase, a blogging evangelist. I have a vision for Birmingham’s internet community (and I use Birmingham in this context as a shorthand for “the urban sprawl from Solihull to Wolverhampton”) which I’m sure will be very different to what actually emerges but I like to think it’s a useful and somewhat empowering vision.

In short it involves those people who know what’s going on using structured platforms like blogging to get their knowledge out there and in doing so to link up all the areas of activity in one big complex but connected network. I’m looking at this from a creative / arts perspective but the beauty of that is is overlaps into all areas of the city/ies. My aim is to show people firstly that this is useful and important both to them as individuals and to the wider communities and secondly that it’s really easy. For various reasons good or ill setting up a website is seen as a complex and costly exercise, but it isn’t.

And it occurred to me that if I’m right about this then the benefits to the city will not be insignificant in the long term. And then it occurred to me that there exist agencies in the West Mids who’s remit is to promote the use of new media technologies (ie, the internet), not to mention this incredibly nebulous notion of Birmingham becoming a “digital city”.

And it finally occurred to me that there’s a fair bit of money floating around all this, some being spent wisely and some falling into drains of pointlessness. If I can figure out some way of quantifying blogging evangelism I could get me some of that money and put it to good use. Workshops, drop-ins, consultations…

I think a visit to one of those business advice setups is in order.