I’m not sure what the protocol here is. If it were an election I’d give a short thank you to the campaign team and so forth and I think that’s reasonable. So thanks to everyone who votes for me in the Brummie of the Year award. I got an frankly incredible 336 votes which, even allowing for multiples, is way more than I’d ever have imagined.
But it wasn’t enough to beat John Tighe of the Spotted Dog pub and, to be honest, I’m glad he won. While it would have be cool to fuck with the heads of people who had no idea what a blogger was he’s the more deserving candidate, not just because he’s been doing good stuff for the city under the radar for years if not decades. But I banged on about John already. Second to him is fine by me.
So what now? Well, this has brought home a few notions. This blogging about Birmingham lark seems to be rather well appreciated so we really need to get that moving a bit. I’ve been doing some spots of training and teaching along these lines (which I will write about soon) which have helped me narrow the whole thing down to a manageable bunch of concepts and other developments in the Birmingham online world (such as the forthcoming new Post site) should add to the conversation, or at least provide tools and material for it to take place.
The next month, then, is going to be spent laying the groundwork for this project. While it’s still all a big mess in my head I think there’s going to be two strands. The first is a free resource, probably on this site or maybe spun off to a dedicated blog, providing all the information you might need to start blogging. Not just setting one up but how to use your blog to communicate. The second prong will be ways you can pay me to teach you as this seems to work really well from the feedback I’ve had. So far we’ve got training courses run by others (visiting lecturer style), informal group work (for want of a better word – this is really Stef’s idea) and 1 on 1 mentoring. The mentoring thing I’m particularly keen on as it can be done online as well as off and I should be able to keep the costs right down.
But all this can wait until after my holiday, most of which will be spent on the beach drawing massive mind-maps in the sand!
(Actually, that’s not a bad idea…)
So near! well done Pete and you should definitely blog some sand mind maps so us freezing Brummies can get insanely jealous!
Well done mate – onwards and upwards!
Many congrats. on a great result, well deserved. M