June 22nd, 2008
11:54 am by bounder
Birmingham: It's Not Shit loves Birmingham and has loads of news and features. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed.
Councillor 2.0 Martin Mullaney extends his media empire with a new podcast, a great idea which is sort of “Moseley Island Disks”. Martin has a chat to a Moseleyite and plays their five favourite records.
First victim is Colin Troth, who helped get the Rotunda listed and features as one of the stories in 21 Stories, the film, photo exhibition and book about the Rotunda we keep praising to high heavens (currently on show at the Three White Walls Gallery in the Mailbox).
Download Link for those without Flash
June 19th, 2008
12:57 pm by bounder
Despite the speed of the web, and my anal skim-reading of absolutely everything that mentions Brum, I still end up finding out things from the Evening Mail (or it’s 15 at a time, title only RSS feeds at least). Today I learnt that there are two projects in Brum up for Lottery Funding in one of these dreadful public votes (leading to lottery idol TV show).
Nechells Baths are looking for help with the restoration, the Lottery web-site says £1.6M (but seems to talk in the past tense) while the Mail article talks about two thousand pounds [Edit, as Dave Harte says below, this isn't a vote for funding? I can't make head or any other body part of it]. You can vote just with a click, without registering (think it looks at IP address, so if anyone was to continually reset their router and are on a ISP with dynamic IP addresses…).
There’s a link through to an organisation called the Birmingham Foundation, a charity I’d never come across before, they obviously do a lot of good work but don’t like to talk about it.
(photo by ray_wilkes2003)
May 19th, 2008
9:06 am by bounder
Created in Birmingham, where you’re most likely to find links to arty stuff rather than a row, posted about the Surface Unsigned ‘festival’ (an interminably drawn-out battle of the bands competition). After originally being fairly positive (and liking a couple of the bands) Danny Smith dug a little deeper and was unsettled by the rules of the competition — specifically that if bands didn’t sell enough tickets then they couldn’t progress to the next round.
Surface seem to have not enjoyed this bit of publicity, as Danny revealed on Friday last that they sent a faux-legal “take down request” to him (Pete Ashton has the text of the email here). Where as they could have cited Britain’s sue-friendly libel laws (they’d have been wrong in my opinion) and made it squeaky-bum time, they decided to talk about copyright (Danny quoted from the horse’s mouth, their rule-book). That’s where they’re quite wrong as far as I can see, as for the purposes of reporting quoting is considered fair-use.
Since they like rules so much, they’d better learn those of blogging and the law hadn’t they? I don’t have any respect for they way they’ve handled it at all.
May 14th, 2008
8:01 am by bounder
And or those that lol, there’s also a wealth of lolDeirdrie style pics.
May 13th, 2008
12:41 pm by bounder
Freecycling is basically giving stuff that you don’t want away. Direct to those who want or need it. Good for the environment, good for your emotional health too. Birmingham Freecyclers hang out here.
For historical reasons I assume, it’s based around the fairly clunky Yahoo Groups system — basically an email list with a web interface. That’s not the easiest of systems - and email groups are prone to SPAM if they’re not kept moderated. There are also rules, which the moderators enforce (things like no asking for stuff until you’ve given, that sort of stuff) — which makes moderation a fairly big job. If it seems like a job that you’d like to help out at, then they’re looking for a few people to help out.
Last time the call went out I was surprised at the way it was handled — basically asking for a small number of people to do a lot of work, instead of the much more web efficient lots of people to do a little bit — maybe any offers are going to be greatfully received this time.
Personally I’ve found it great for getting rid of stuff, although sometimes the tone of emails (as with any systems, message boards, forums) is a bit harsh — it’s still nowhere as annoying as selling on ebay (”will you split it up into two packages”, “how much to post by snail to the Outer Hebrides”).
Go and have a look, you might find that Pannini Football 87 sticker you’ve been missing.
May 12th, 2008
2:52 pm by bounder
We mentioned Live Brum before, but as of now it’s, er, Live.
Josh Hart has put together the site with the idea of making it as easy as possible to put events in — and getting the listings out in any way you desire. RSS feeds for dates, venues, genres, little widgets for you to pop the event on your blog or website (like the Moseley Folk one below), there’s even a very clever twitter thing coming soon I hear, or you can just browse however you like.
It’s certainly easy to use, almost everything can be clicked on to take you to more listings, or more information and Josh is willing to listen to feature requests and other ideas — as well as working hard still on his own — so it can only get better.
I’m thinking that I might like it to learn what sort of events I attend and push recommendation a little how Amazon does, but as a launch product it’s fantastic. Birmingham might just have got the events listing website it deserves.
May 7th, 2008
10:33 pm by bounder
As part of The Big Picture (disclaimer - I’m working on this) there’s a competition the prize of which is to have your photo blown up and displayed on a 48 sheet billboard (that’s the really big landscape ones). Any photo added to the project on Big Picture Day (8th May, tomorrow as I write) stands a chance - and there’s a billboard for each area in the project, including Brum.
There’s also an event in Victoria Square with a load of celeb lookalikes.
May 6th, 2008
11:40 am by bounder
You can download the Beeb’s cut of Telly Savalas looks at Birmingham from YouTube (download mp4 link is on right hand side).
May 2nd, 2008
2:01 am by bounder
You might not think the most fun you can have of an evening is to watch one man gamely present a webcast for four hours while chatting on the internet, but an evening in the presence of Adrian Goldberg and Brum’s twitterverse was good enough for me. Together we could enjoy the local elections.
Adrian really held together a potentially toe-curling show, and the usual suspects online were great entertainment, cheering on pac-man (the webcast graphics), wondering if Adrian was getting a Napoleon complex, ah well.
If you fancy reading it (you’ll have to go from bottom to top) it’s here as text, here still on the web, and here as a huge pdf (5mb).
April 17th, 2008
4:47 pm by bounder
Nemo, on air light, ashtray - not the worst set of ingredients to get on a surreal game of Ready Steady Cook, it’s what greets you on the front of the new website for Broad St. I’m being sarky, the site looks great (by 383) - and if it means I can get all the info without actually having to go to Broad St, so much the better.
