That was a pretty hectic weekend even by my standards with loads to write about. Hopefully I’ll be able to write about it in a way that’s useful and interesting but for now I’ll settle for bullet points just so it’s out there.
Thursday
- Hello World launch party, most notable for Mike Whitby’s atrocious and embarrassing speech. I know that by his standards this was nothing new but this was the first time it was about my industry and it was painful. If you’re not aware Mr Whitby is our de-facto Mayor. He runs the city. Pity us.
Friday
- The day was spent at Cadbury College in Kings Norton where they’re planning to give about 250 of their A level students blogs over the next year. Details aside this was a fascinating session introducing teachers and support staff to the concepts surrounding social media and working through the issues they might have with letting their students publish and converse over it. I could write a paper on this I suspect.
- Thanks to that I missed the day’s Hello Digital talks but made the after party, naturally, which was rather good fun as these things go. And then I was asked if I’d like to join Heather Champ from Flickr and Michal Makarewicz of Pixar for dinner. Why me, given the choice of people in the room, I have no idea but having known of Heather over Internets for about 7 years I jumped at the chance. Lovely evening, as you’d expect.
Saturday
- Heather had asked if she could meet up with a load of Flickr people while she was in the city so naturally a Flickrmeet was arranged. It started at the Mailbox at noon and finished in a graveyard in the Jewellery Quarter at 5pm. Here are my photos and the group thread . Five hours in the open air was a bit of a novelty for me so I kinda crashed Saturday night and just processed my photos, missing Mechakitten, but what can you do…
Sunday
- This saw me up early, for a Sunday, to go to the Inspiration Session on Community Management run by the lovely 4Talent people. Loads to report on here which I’ll intend to do over on ASH-10. Suffice to say it was much more useful than I’d expected and served as a bit of a wake-up call for me. Putting myself in the student seat in an area I usually teach is something I should do more often.
- After that I dashed along to The Odeon for Into The Light, an evening celebrating Michael Balcan who amongst other things produced all the Ealing films. Inbetween the intro and the showing of Kind Hearts and Coronet the winner of Film Dash was announced. We won. And so Dunkirk, our film, was shown on the big screen. Which was really mad. Still processing all that to be honest.
Monday
- I crashed, mostly, but thanks to a couple of friends saying they’d be there I dragged myself to the Birmingham Bloggers Meet. I was so glad I did. It was so great to be socialising for the sake of socialising for once and I had a lovely time shooting the shit with good people. I need to make more space for that sort of thing I think.
And that was it. I’ll try and write longer posts over the next few days. Honest.
