peteashtondotcom

If proof were somehow needed that lolcat speak has pretty much infiltrated every aspect of modern society I offer you this. The editor of the reasonably well respected Birmingham Post newspaper, considered to be somewhat of the establishment, posted the following to his Twitter account yesterday:

Either it’s the dawn of a new age or it’s the end of civilisation as we know it. I’ll let you decide.

And so it came to pass that I found myself with another blogging outlet, this time for the Birmingham Post, our local broadsheet newspaper that coincidentally just relaunched it’s website as something a darn sight better than the icnetwork abortion they used to have. My first post there has the catchy title What exactly does Global City Local Heart mean? and will be of interest to no-one outside the Birmingham metropolitan area and remarkably few inside. Which is kinda interesting really.

In fact this whole Birmingham Post Blogs thing is a pretty interesting experiment as the closest thing it’s ripping off (and that’s not a criticism - everything online is a rip off of something else) is, from my perspective anyway, The Guardian’s Comment Is Free only with a local perspective. And while the target audience presumably remains the same - the business and political communities of the West Midlands - it’s got a potentially global reach. Potentially being the key word there, but still.

All said, though, this is early days and we’ll see how it develops over the next few months before passing any kind of judgment. I did want to put down some thoughts about why I’m contributing to it though.

If you’ve been paying attention and joining up the dots you’ll probably know that Joanna Geary is in charge of running the Post Blogs and that’s she’s a friend of mine, but that wasn’t the motivation for joining. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind or hers until I heard Jon Bounds was thinking about it. Hell, if that fucker’s in then I’ll be damned if I’m not, I thought to myself. Jokingly, of course.

And then I had a little think. I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of context online of late, brought into relief by the Max Gogarty debacle but also based on my various blogging outlets. I write in a subtle but markedly different voice on all of them based on a variety of assumptions - the perceived audience, the suitability of the subject matter, the level of irreverence I want to convey or simply the sort of blog I’m trying to sculpt. And most of these will be quite subconscious as I evolve into the skin of the beast, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor there. If I was writing under the banner of a newspaper owned by Trinity Mirror how would my writing change? That’d be interesting, I thought.

But, it must be said, not interesting enough to do it for free. Oh yes, we who aren’t on the payroll aren’t getting paid for this. So if I was going to join this merry band of opinioneers I needed another compelling reason to do so. That came pretty quickly, all said. I have many missions, two of which can be summed up as “Promoting blogging and related forms of online communication” and “Changing how Birmingham as a city works for the betterment of man and womankind”. This venue lets me deal with both of them at once, helping to shape the development of a relatively high profile blogging community whilst getting my message to that newspaper’s perceived target audience. In other words, were I to write about our council leader Mike Whitby on this blog he won’t notice or care, but when I do so on the Post site an eye, be it his or a lowly assistant, will pass over it. It turns out that Created in Birmingham gave me a platform in this city. Not a particularly high one but a platform all the same. This gives me another one pointing in a different direction. And considering I’m not really required to write more than once a week if that it’s worth it.

The thing is, having written that first piece in ignorance of how the site would work I’m not completely happy with it. It reads, oddly enough, like my attempt at a newspaper column, not a blog. Looks like finding my voice there isn’t going to be as easy as I might have thought, which is no bad thing.

If you’re already subscribed to my Yahoo Pipe then you’ll be getting the Post blog posts through that. The rest of you can use this feed and I’ll no doubt link to them here too, just for the record.

Oh, and it wasn’t my idea to be a “Lifestyle” blogger. I’m not even sure what that means. Maybe I’m supposed to be blogging about furniture or something…

Just a small case of the man-flu. Should be up and running in a bit.

So I’m sitting at my desk and suddenly there’s this rattling coming from upstairs like someone’s running on the spot and my angle-poise lamp shakes. I think, hmm, that’s odd. And then it stops. And I shrug and carry on with whatever I was doing.

And then a couple of hours later for some reason or other I check on Twitter.

And it occurs to me that despite having more technology in my laptop than a 1980’s newspaper it’s no good being in the middle of a news story if you’re not aware it’s a news story.

I’d make such a crap journalist.

(Unlike Jo who’s been running a breaking news service from her bed by the looks of things.)

I’ve been informed of a blogging job going in Birmingham this spring, specifically for the Fierce Festival. If you’re interested get in touch and I’ll pass on your details.

There’s a small amount of money going and I’d guess you’d get access to all events. I suspect they’re after someone with knowledge of blogging and social networks more than someone from the arts community. Someone like I was a couple of years ago really. So if you’ve fancied doing something like Created in Birmingham and want a fast-track into finding out who and what and where and why this is, as they say, a fantastic opportunity. Email in the sidebar.

If I might throw a little anecdotal evidence into this agency workers should have full time rights debate…

I worked for a temp agency for most of 2003-2006. Usually I was on very short term contracts or a few days or weeks. Very rarely did I stay longer than a couple of months. I did this because it suited me and would not have wanted the rights and benefits of a full time member of staff.

Whilst on this itinerant labouring adventure I met many fellow temps, some of whom had been working in the same place for years. They were doing the same job as full time members of staff for less money with no benefits. This doesn’t just mean no pension or sick pay. This means they could be told at any time that they wouldn’t be needed the next day. No warning, no notice, no claiming unfair dismissal.

Temp work can be a great thing if you need some cash to live on but don’t want to get tied to a full time job. But it is too often used by employers to bypass their legal requirements. After a certain period temporary stops being temporary and this needs to be sorted out.

According to the BBC “employers’ groups such as the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) say that extending their rights will compromise labour market flexibility and ultimately cost jobs.” Sorry, but three years in one job as a temp sounds like a little too much flexibility.

Dere Lisa and Jenny,

Pls book Bert and Ernie for Supersonic? Heer is a vidjo of them.

kthnxbai!

via Steve Gerrard

Like anyone who wanted to be an astronaut as a kid the concept of Google sending robots to the moon by 2012 is a heart warming one indeed. And sure, it’s a rather mad yet achievable goal that in the process with no doubt produce all manner of cool by-product stuff. But watching the video I was left slightly uneasy. See for yourself.

The underlying thread here is the answer to our problems is to go to the moon and mine the shit out of it. I dunno about that. I quite like the idea of the moon as an international reserve, rather like how mining in Antarctica isn’t allowed. The reason being we can see the moon quite clearly and, on a purely selfish basis, that matters. Sure, go fuck with Mars, I don’t mind, but the moon? That be the sacred place.

via D’log

One thing that came out of Thursday’s party, where I stood on a chair and everyone applauded and my knees went all wobbly, was the pondering of what next for Created in Birmingham, something Stef and I have been talking about for a while but not really nailed down. While I don’t want to fuck with a winning formula there are factors at work that mean that formula as it stands might not be viable. Firstly I’m coming across more and more information and processing that is becoming something of a nightmare. I’m not just missing stuff, I’m actively aware I’m missing stuff. Secondly, CiB has put me in a very different position to where I was a year ago. At some point the need for me to do the blog isn’t going to be there.

I hasten to add with much vocality that this isn’t going to happen any time soon but it pays to be prepared.

The idea that’s currently in the lead involves taking on someone to help with the running of the blog. If you like an assistant editor to the editor looking after the links, monitoring the CiB email and suchlike, freeing me up to do more interesting things. And then the logical conclusion is that assistant eventually becomes the editor running the blog and taking on another assistant. All old editors are still available in an emeritus-type roll and the whole process is approached as a training program for new bloggers.

But who to take on? One issue Stef and I identified is that I’m now too involved with Birmingham’s arts scenes. Not from an impartiality standpoint, although that’s always an issue, but because I don’t need to did anymore. When I started I was following leads and uncovering people who weren’t necessarily on the big radar. These days I don’t do that so much because I get enough stuff to fill the blog from what have become the usual places. So the ideal candidate would be someone like I was in 2005 - an outsider who’s interested in finding out how it all works.

They’d also have to either be comfortable with the blogging form or willing and able to learn it. CiB, for better or worse, represents blogging to a lot of people in the city. Personally I’d like to take on someone with a lot of blogging experience under the belt who wants to stretch themselves a bit and earn some cash doing it though I’m also aware that I’m being unreasonable about this and am probably wrong. Why this is an issue I’m not really sure. Whatever, the blogging thing is an integral part of the program.

The are other ideas. A group blog, for example, to spread the load over the the range of subjects that I’m not covering properly at the moment. Or some kind of of blogging network with me in a managing editor / mentoring role. But these, while interesting, tend to miss the point. CiB was never supposed to be The Blog for Birmingham’s creative community. Amongst other things it’s supposed to be an example, explaining a system of communication and promotion by deed rather than theory. It’s important, sure, but it only needs at most two people to run it.

Anyway, I’d be interested in feedback on this, with the big flashing banner saying This Is Still An Idea and nothing has been decided by anyone, not least myself.

And so it was, suffering lack of sleep and a bit of a hangover, I found myself at the official launch of The Big Picture where, to my delight, I discovered that I somewhat dyslexically was responsible for the whole city.

Yup, that was me, the shadowy figure guiding the Lunar Society and whispering in Chamberlain’s ear. I’m looking good for my age, I know.

I’m not really sure why I was there other than that I know a few of the people involved though I guess the “social media outreach arts flickr” angles might have done it. The problem I have with this project is right now, while everything works and looks lovely and well done everyone and that, it doesn’t actually mean anything. That meaning will come, I’m sure, as they take these photos and work with them. Jon Bounds, a somewhat inspired hire, has some cool ideas for projects with the aim of helping people see their snapshots as art and to get better, and I can testify to this stuff helping - I owe my current level of photography know-how entirely to Flickr and the various communities therein. With some good notions and sound agendas this should all work rather well.

But right now it’s in the process of getting there and part of that process is a nice launch party for the funders, partners and other people who wear suits on a regular basis. Ask me for my judgement again in a few months.

First, the links:

Max, 19, Hits The Road
In which our hero starts to blog his gap year in Thailand on the Guardian website.
Travel editor’s response to yesterday’s blog
In which said travel editor attempts to justify why Max was blogging on the Guardian website.
The week that was
In which the mighty Emily Bell goes all meta.
Hate mail hell of a gap-year blogger
In which the Observer, bizarrely, treats this as a news story.
Wayne Type, 19, hits the road
In which Teh Internets provide the inevitable yet somewhat entertaining parody.

I’m a bit late to this partly because I wanted to see how it would play out and partly because I just didn’t get around to it yesterday, but there are a few interesting things to draw out of it.

The nepotism charge is, I think, misplaced. Sure, Max got the job (if he’s even getting paid for it) based on who he knew but that’s generally how most of these things happen. There’s nothing inherently wrong with networking to get opportunites, especially in the media. Sure, it’s distasteful but it doesn’t really mean anything.

What’s more interesting is the context. When something appears under the Guardian logo - or indeed the logo of any major media outlet - you expect a certain quality. This doesn’t mean you expect it to be of high quality but there are expectations. For example, I expect something on Ain’t It Cool News to be written in a juvenile OTT manner so having something written by, say, Leonard Maltin on there would just be wrong. Similarly a rounded and sensible article on the social internet on The Register would confuse the hell out me.

The Guardian’s biggest mistake was transplanting the sort of blog that thousands of traveling teens write onto their pages and thinking it would work. These sorts of blogs aren’t intended for a huge readership. They’re written for the friends of the bloggers and to those readers they’re the fantastic. To everyone else they’re anodyne self-indulgent rubbish. And the thing is that doesn’t devalue them in the slightest.

I read someone recently talking about YouTube and how big media producers get it terribly wrong when they dismiss the millions of videos on there as being rubbish. To the five or ten people they’re aimed at they’re not rubbish - they’re genius. They went on to make the point that those five or ten people are watching this stuff instead of the big media products because they have a connection with it - that’s it’s authentic in a way stuff on the BigTube can’t be. (Can’t find the link right now but I’ll try again later.)

Max’s blog was deeply authentic to his friends and family, which is why they’re so upset by the reaction. But to everyone else it was bollocks. Both opinions are right. That post was the textual equivalent of sitting behind a bunch of annoying teenagers on a train. The teenagers think what they’re talking about is vital and important - the rest of us wish they’d shut the fuck up about their holidays.

That said, you wouldn’t be to surprised to find this sort of stuff in the paper itself, buried away as filler in section 7 of the Sunday edition. But online the hierarchy is self selecting thanks to the power of the inbound link. The Guardian can try to set the agenda on how it’s content is viewed but ultimately it has no say in what’s considered important. The readers will decide that through email, IM, blogs, Facebook, etc. This is a great thing, of course, but it also means you’ve got to be careful. Nothing happens in obscurity anymore, especially if you want it to.

But ultimately this was an error in register. The editor thought that since teens were blogging about their trips abroad they would like to read the blog of a teen on a trip abroad. What he didn’t ask was why people might be interested in reading Max’s blog. Why should I listen to him? Here’s some reasons I can think of.

1) I know Max. Not just in the sense that I’ll be generous to his literary failing but that I’ll understand where he’s coming from and be able to put his views into some context.

2) Someone who knows Max has recommended I read his blog because I hope to do what he’s doing. The personal recommendation by a mutual acquaintance is very powerful.

3) Max has built up a reputation as a good travel blogger. Bing! Let me expand on that one a bit.

Sure, anyone can start a blog. That’s the beauty of them. And most blogs will have a tiny audience because that’s all they were intended to have. Most bloggers don’t want to be “successful” - success to them is having a conversation with a few readers and other bloggers. They don’t want to talk to thousands of people.

The central charge of nepotism isn’t really to do with Max’s Dad being a freelance journo or whatever - it’s to do with the Guardian giving someone a platform who demonstrably didn’t deserve it. Not because of his writing skills but because he hadn’t earned his spurs, as it were. They were setting him up as an authority figure when his authority was seriously lacking. If he had an archive of work online with plenty of inbound links and a nice little community then, yes, you could justify giving him a blog. It might even work well, encouraging him to improve his style in a more challenging environment. Indeed, figuring out how to write a travel blog in a way that isn’t chronically boring to anyone who doesn’t know you would be a good challenge.

So what would I have done? Given that there are plenty of teens blogging their gap year in 3rd world countries I’d task a journalist with monitoring them, with permission of course. Ask 20 or so of them if they’d be willing for excerpts to be posted on the Guardian’s travel blog once a week in a roundup. Keep it light and dilute the inevitable hate from the Guardian’s noxious commenting community by spreading it across a wider number of bloggers from different backgrounds. That’s the sort of thing a newspaper blog should be doing.

Credit to Si before it went viral.