No, really, I’m grateful. It’s just…

In brief: I’m knackered and I’m going offline for four days. Be back Tuesday night.

The last two months of my life have been pretty fucking insane. In fact I had to bring up my calendar to check as it’s all one big blur right now. Insane in a really good, life changing sort of way but insane all the same. So this post is an attempt to try and put it all down in a manageable way before I bugger off to Devon for a long weekend of Paternal comforts and mud.

Everything’s been building up since last autumn really, around the time the Created in Birmingham blog starting to get noticed in the city dragging me along with it. At first being recognized at events and being asked for advice on blogging was weird and disconcerting. Now it’s become normal. This is even more weird and disconcerting. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Over Christmas I was hoping my month in New Zealand would give me a chance to get everything straight in my head and set out a plan of action for 2008. Unfortunately New Zealand was far too interesting so I never got a chance to do that. Still, not much happens in the arts scene in January so I figured I’d have a chance when I got back. And then the Guardian award hit. In itself not a big deal (awards don’t mean nuffink after all) but it once again raised my profile. Organisations that had previously shunned me, fearing the power of The Blog, invited me in to chat about strategy. People running stuff who I jokingly said should “get a blog” asked me how they could do it. More critically I started to realise I could charge a lot of money for what’s going on in my brain. I just needed to figure out how.

And then just as I was starting feel like I needed another holiday SXSWi came along. That week was kinda mental. On the Thursday Stef and I ran a blogging seminar for Arts Council East in Coventry. That evening we rushed down to London for the Guardian award ceremony with Jo where the booze was flowing like water. Then after a 2am Taxi to Gatwick and a barely slept in hotel bed we were flying off to Texas at 9am.

Four of the most inspiring days of my life then followed. My brain was filled to the brim not so much with new ideas but with ideas I’d been nurturing suddenly given context, purpose and massive scope. By the end of it Stef and I joked we were going to take over the city. We were on fire. Everything made sense now. All we needed to do was put into practice.

That was a month ago and, yes, stuff does seem to be happening with the concepts we brought back with us. Again, it’s nothing radical or new, just a case of taking what’s here and empowering it for the benefit of all.

The only problem is I went into all this knackered and came out of it close to death. So far I’ve crashed twice (both times on a Thursday, oddly enough) finding myself physically and mentally unable to function. And unlike when this has happened in the past it’s not an anxiety attack or depression. It’s simply mental exhaustion. The metaphor I like to use is my brain as a hairdryer that’s overheating so it just shuts down, wet hair be damned. I look at the emails and the feeds and the notes and it’s not that I can’t do the stuff, it’s just that I can’t do the stuff. Brain freeze.

And while in some areas I’m coming on in ways I never thought possible (public speaking, for example) in others I’m suffering. Created in Birmingham is, ironically, the biggest casualty of all this. I came back from Texas ready to quit the blog I’d not-quite won an award for 5 days previously. The project that pretty much defined me in the city for the last year is now a hinderance, it seems. Which kinda makes sense. I started it as a journey – my explorations of Birmingham’s creative and cultural scenes coming at it as a complete novice. I didn’t know how anything worked in January 2007. Now I do. It’s probably not a stretch to say I’m part of the establishment now (which is one reason why working in Birmingham is so nice – someone like me can become part of the establishment in 12 months just by doing stuff). So whereas my CiB was something that dragged me into stuff, forcing me to get out there and figure it all out, it’s now something that’s holding me back. And I think it’s been blatantly obvious to anyone checking the site as well, despite the valiant efforts of my guest bloggers.

Thankfully one of the aims of Created in Birmingham has come to fruition. There’s now a network of blogs in the city that collectively do what CiB used to do so, within reason, that joke about aiming to make the blog irrelevant through example has sort of come true. I just need to put together a CiB recommends list or something. Another one for the pile then.

But lest you think this is the end of that blog, fear not. It’s not going away. It will be changing and hopefully I’ll be able to write about that soon, once we figure out exactly what it’s going to change into. That’ll another thing on the pile.

So what am I doing if it’s not the CiB blog? Well, after months of faffing I’ve finally got a desk in the Custard Factory which has been really good and the new site is coming online later this month. I’m not doing the whole design thing, just looking after the blog and events which frees me up to do more interesting things using the website to augment the physical site. I think I’m turning into some kind of “communications officer” there but not in a PR sense, more in the sense of enabling communication between the tenants and across the CF generally. Which is going to be a hell of a challenge akin to herding cats but it really ties in with a lot of the post-SXSWi ideas so I’m looking forward to it. Of course this all needs a lot of strategising, figuring out ways to explain my ideas to a wide number of people and then refining them as I explain them. Top-down isn’t going to work here but the tools aren’t in place to do many-to-many. So yeah, work needed there.

On top of this the previously ludicrous and now potentially lucrative blogging consultancy lark is taking off. I’ve done about 8 training sessions within the creative scene and they’ve been getting better and more focussed as I go along. Feedback has also been good with people finding them both inspiring and practical. And on a personal level it’s really handy to explain this stuff to novices and connect the rarefied work I function in with the reality of everyone else. There’s a lot of scope to take this further. Right now I’m just doing intro work through other programs but the meat is, I feel, in the mentoring. Holding Jo‘s hand through her first few months of blogging was quite inspiring and when I put the idea out about formalising this many people seemed interested. Then there’s other more commercial things such as doing monthly health reports on company blogs and the like.

While I haven’t actually charged anyone for it yet the few sit down chats with city orgs I’ve had about how they might use social media tools have been very fruitful. Using blogs and blog-like-things in companies and organisations is quite radically different to individuals using the medium and figuring out how these bodies deal with the conversation that’s going on around and about them is kinda fun. It also helps me get away from the usual ideas about blogging and moves me into more abstract notions of this all about about packets of stuff wrapped up in metadata that lives across the internet. This is pretty high concept thinking really and I feel the need to be drawing some very big graphs and possibly knuckling down with an academic or two, all of which takes time.

And on the subject of commercial work I’m being courted by Sebastian at Spring Digital who wants to move into the social media area and pretty much outlined a full time position for me there. I’m not interested in that but I am interested in some of the things I could do under his umbrella (and, natch, with his money), one of which will be a new blog about cutting edge social media stuff, once I get it started. Oh, and massive opportunities for the stuff I mentioned above. The win-win is I help him move his company into this new world and he supports me researching and writing about the stuff that keeps me ahead of the game. The SXSWi stuff, in other words. That is, once I find time to do it.

What else… Well, there’s all the general Birmingham stuff which tends to split into two levels. Stef and I seem to have a good system in place. I generally look after the grass roots, DIY stuff while he looks after the city-wide, strategy stuff and then we bring the two together. Or at least that’s the plan. it’s mostly theoretical right now but some really interesting stuff has come out of his dealings (which I’ll let him talk about when the time is right). On my end (which seems a little pretentious as it’s not just me, it’s everyone, including Stef, but that’s what you get when you go all grass roots DIY) gently nudging the local blogging community is going well but what’s really exciting me is figuring out ways to take these online tools that us nerds take for granted and spreading them city wide. Running a blog is as easy as sending email. Online video is absurdly simple to do. If we can take the models that we use to communicate online and apply them to other areas of activity in the city then things could get really interesting on a political level. The system might be rotten but it’s only there because there’s a vacuum. If we can make the people the system and force the politicians to deal with that then, well, you get the idea. It’s all about giving people tools that augment their offline lives in positive ways and getting that to a critical mass.

So you hopefully get the idea. I’m on fire but close to burning out. I think I had two decent meals this last week and the week before is pretty sketchy. I’m sleeping a lot but I’m not resting. Everyone I talk to is interesting and sparks new ideas. I was all ready for a relaxing weekend last week until I realised I was having dinner on Sunday with Stef and Dubber and John Mostyn and Jo and others of that ilk. Its great. No, it’s fucking fantastic, but I need to stop.

I need to stop so bad.

So I’m going away for a long weekend. Dad has a new-ish (in that they moved in last year and I still haven’t visited) house in Devon, near to where my step-sister and her family live. By all accounts it’s in the middle of nowhere. I’m switching off for four days. No blogging, no feed checking, no email. I’ll have the phone on so texts and Twitter direct messages will get to me (when I’m in range) but I won’t reply unless it’s important, the threshold for which will be high. I’ll be taking the computer and may do some writing but the wireless is staying off. (Although I might install WordPress 2.5 and redesign this blog. Or not. We’ll see.)

– — –

Y’know, quickly re-reading this I’m thinking it’s not enough. There are details that need fleshing out, things that happened that I haven’t talked about, ideas and plans that are bubbling under the ones that are bubbling, but I have to stop somewhere. Promised someone a framework document thing (whatever that actually means) about using del.icio.us in the workplace on Wednesday so I really ought to get it done now.

See you on the other side!