The blogs are starting to get a few comments: Roshan Doug, James Treadwell, Stef Lewandowski and Terry Grimley have recieved good-quality responses. Terry’s is longer than his actual post, which is both unbelievable and wonderful. I’ve always had a feeling that Terry would make a good blogger… he has said he plans to respond to comments soon.
I’m so nervous…it feels so scary to have to wait to see what works and what doesn’t.
I’ve already realised that we might have been slightly guilty of letting form get in the way of content, with some very good blog posts ending up in some very odd blog sections. It’s nothing that can’t be changed with a bit of aggregator wizardry… but it’s a lesson learnt.
I just hope our bloggers keep up the good posts!
As an aside, I’m still looking to cover a few more areas in the blogs, namely: music, sport and politics.
It has been pointed out to me more than once that there’s not a strong right-of-centre voice amongst our current team. I might disagree, but still… there’s certainly room for more controversy…
I’ve been putting off this blog post, due to the fact that what I am about to do is simultaneously awesome and terrifying!
I am one of the lucky, lucky West Midland digital media bods to be going to the SXSW Interactive festivial in Austin, Texas. We fly out this Friday and I know it’s going to be brilliant!
The group of five six, all covering different sections of the West Midland media industry, are going courtesy of Digital Central. The thinking behind the project is explained more in depth by Stef Lewandowski, who also went it SXSWi last year.
I’m looking forward to it (does it show?) but I can’t do it without you. This thing is SO BIG, I don’t know what to see, where to go, or what parties to drink at to make the most of my time there! So if you are someone with a passing interest in the future of journalism on the web (and I suspect if you’re reading this blog then you are), then I beg of you: Pop over to www.sxswm.com (where all of us will be streaming our feeds over the next week) and ask me to do stuff!
I will, of course, be tweeting the whole affair like a good’un and blogging too. I might even try a few other communication channels (if plans to get my mitts on a Nokia N95 pay off). One way of another, if you ask me to do something, I will feed back to you about it. So please, check out SXSWM and send me to some good stuff.
I remember being shown this video by Pete Ashton, about the same time as I first dipped my toe into the blogging pool. I watched it again today in amazement at how much more I understood about social media and how much I still had to learn.
If you haven’t seen it (and I know it has done the rounds on the web for over a year) it is an introduction to the social Internet by Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University.
I’ve realised I need to keep re-visiting it as I make my mistakes and learn my own lessons about the web. So, I thought I’d post it here:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g]
So… there it is. The shiny new Birmingham Post website is now up and running.
We also have a blogs section covering news, business and lifestyle. Those be the bits I’ve helped to organise.
There’s still a lot to do and more bloggers to add tomorrow (!) but I’m pretty pleased. We’ve all worked really hard…
…which is why I am now going to go home and sleep.
Night!