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Posts Tagged michael grimes

A whole lotta cheese Just some of the cheese at the party The Gruyere from Michael Grimes was well flavoursome Lots of very smelly cheese on toast Some of our preserves and pickles


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December 21, 2010 at 4:05 pm · Filed under Digbeth is Good, Doing my thing, Hyperlocal ·Tagged 853 blog, Birmingham it's Not Shit, citizensheep, Created in Birmingham, Darryl, Digbeth Is Good, digbeth.org, hyperlocal, kings cross environment, michael grimes, myvillages, myvillages.com, Roifield Brown, Stuart Harrison, the yam yam, william perrin 853's post 'Sorry RSS readers...' was pumped straight into myvillages.com

Today I picked up on the above post from 853 blog’s manager Darryl, apologising to his readers for altering his RSS feed and blaming ‘thieving myvillage idiots’:

…unfortunately I?ve had to bring this into place because of abuse of the RSS feed by the MyVillage network of sites, whose rubbish Greenwich site has been pulling in content from 853 to help it attract readers and advertisers under the banner of ?local news?.

William Perrin commented that material (including photographs) had been reused by myvillage from his website http://www.kingscrossenvironment.com without his consent.  A vague bell rang in my head about a myvillage Birmingham, so I searched and lo and behold, there was content (again including photographs) taken from the RSS feed of Digbeth is Good. A quick scan showed me content from Birmingham it’s Not Shit and Created in Birmingham was on there too. I tweeted my annoyance and quite an interesting discussion ensued, which is in this Storify.  Some creators of the content myvillage uses (like me) were quite annoyed and others such as Michael Grimes felt it might be a fair use of the RSS feeds we’d published. Whatever the rights and the wrongs of the argument, myvillage’s creator Roifield Brown’s approach has meant that whilst building what aspires to be a profit-making website he’s angered a lot of the creators of the content he relies upon to populate it – not a good start for a business.  As Stuart Harrison commented there is a better way: I emailed Roifield Brown today asking him to remove the Digbeth is Good feed from myvillage, this is the response I received:

Hi Nicky, sorry for the upset that using the first 200 characters from you blog has caused. We have now deleted the feed from publishing on MyVillage. Your blog is an extremely good one and one that I personally read from time to time being a Brummie.

When we started using extracts from blogs last year we emailed the blog owners to ask if this was alright by them. In some cases we did not get a response and we used their blogs. In hindsight this was a mistake, which we will completely correct in the first two weeks of Jan by completing an audit of all rss feeds used. We will ask again if the 200 word characters limit is acceptable before the link back to the article source, if there is a negative answer or no answer we will not use that blog.

Sorry again Nicky.

Rest assured your blog content will not be appearing on any of our sites from here on.

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All work and no play….

October 9, 2009 at 8:31 pm · Filed under Come and play ·Tagged Birmingham, gravehunt, libby heighway, michael grimes, moseley, moseleybarcamp, nikki pugh, st marys

Well, it’s been a good long, while, hasn’t it?  I’m not going to do the cliched apologising for the prolonged silence, most people know I’ve been a busy bee.  In early August I left my job with ACE dance and music to join Will Perrin’s talk about local team and spread the hyperlocal love.  And things have been a wonderful whirlwind since then.

But all work and no play makes me really rather dull.  So that’s probably what this blog will start to become – more of a personal place of play.

And I’m going to start off with a game played with Nikki Pugh on her birthday recently.  Nikki decided she wanted to play the game rather than make it for her special day, and who were we to argue?  So after Libby Heighway and Michael Grimes had finished with Nikki in the Nature Centre, they packed her off to me at the graveyard in St Mary’s Church, Moseley.

She found me there waiting with a piece of cake.  It was only after she’d eaten it I told her it wasn’t her cake, but that of the cake-loving ghosts.  So poor Nikki had to find said ghosts going by the clues below and play them a message from their mean Cake Angel.

Can you spot the gravestones of the ghosts in the slideshow?

Luckily, Nikki managed to find them all in time to get to The Fighting Cocks and enjoy a cake that did belong to her, a grand Michael Grimes creation of chocolate, jelly babies and liquorish all-sorts.

I got all the gravestone-name gathering with Ben Whitehouse, when we were thinking about a possible Moseley Barcamp thing that didn’t happen.  But it was a great day, mulling over the encryptions and thinking about the stories behind them, and it gave me some inspiration eventually!

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Big City Talk

March 1, 2009 at 11:58 pm · Filed under Birmingham ·Tagged big city plan, big city talk, birmingham city council, debra davies, jon bounds, julia gilbert, michael grimes, nick booth

Before Christmas Birmingham City Council released the Big City Plan, a lengthy consultation document about how Birmingham should be developed over the next twenty years.  The document was also put onto the Big City Plan website for members of the public to comment on.

But there were more than a few problems with it.  The document was not only massive but written in impenetrable management speak, it made me glaze over after a couple  sentences – hardly writings that would capture peoples’ imaginations and motivate responses.  It as also full of unexpanded acronyms and references to other key documents that weren’t explained.  It had weird ‘options’ at the end of each chapter that seemed to be mutually exclusive, ‘pick one’ choices but apparently weren’t.

The Big City Plan’s website initially gave the impression that all comments posted would be  published, but they seemed to think better of that later on, so only a few selected comments were published.  This meant that people had no idea if their comments were being listened to and, more importantly, that no conversation around the document could take place – no-one could react to a point another respondent had made and have a discussion that others could join in with.

The way the consultation was conducted bred a fair bit of cynicism.  I often heard people saying they felt their opinions didn’t matter, that ‘decisions have already been made’.  Some felt it was more of a PR exercise than a genuine consultation and incidents such as missing the promised consultation bus didn’t help. People I spoke to felt alienated rather than engaged – a comment on Digbeth is Good calling it a ‘pointless “consultation” scam’ spoke volumes.  I really don’t believe that was the intention, but I can understand why people felt like that given the flawed way in which things were executed.

The Birmingham blogging community felt that something needed to be done to enable a better understanding of the Big City Plan and an open discussion around it.  A few of them knocked their heads together at the Christmas Birmingham Social Media Cafe and it began to take the shape of Big City Talk – a blog with all the sections as individual posts with a plain English translation alongside.  All comments (within reason) were published so people could discuss other people’s responses and ideas.

When I heard about Big City Talk I thought it made perfect sense and offered to help out.  So, along with Jon Bounds, Nick Booth, Julia Gilbert and Michael Grimes I got started on translating sections of the writing into plain English text.  I kept my translations pretty much local, working on the Digbeth, Eastside and Highgate chapters.

It was horrible, slow work, I don’t mind saying.  Not just translating the words into plain English, something I’d never done before, but also trying to work out what they were meant to be saying in the first place.  I’ll never forget me and Michael Grimes, who listened to my cries of woe and helped me out with the Digbeth section, spending half an hour trying to translate one sentance.  It took a phone call to Jon Bounds to finally get there.  I was incredibly relieved when it was all finished.

I was even happier to hear that the work hadn’t been in vain.  Big City Talk collected 274 comments, all of which will be fed into the Big City Plan.  Debra Davies, Birmingham City Council’s PR Director, thanked us for going the extra 9 yards and was pleased at the level of input and discussion.

Here’s related posts from the others involved in Big City Talk:

Jon Bounds has written about the whole process in a series of 4 posts:

Michael Grimes talked about exactly why it needed doing.

Nick Booth talks about how it’s a perfect example of Brummies using social media to make a positive difference.



7 things you may not know about me

January 27, 2009 at 9:54 pm · Filed under Up close and personal ·Tagged andrew solecki, beyond fear, citizensheep, michael grimes, ruth the truth

Bruce Lawson chain-lettered Michael Grimes (aka Citizensheep), who in turn chain-lettered me into blogging about the 7 things you may not know about me.  So here we are – the good, the bad and the ugly:

Okay, so that’s me.  It seems I have to pass the buck now.  I choose Antonio Gould, Ed Russell, Karen Strunks, Snow Blind, Ben Whitehouse, Midge Diabolik and Daniel Davies.  Have fun!

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