Tickets are now on sale (at £35 or £70 if you’re feeling philanthropic) for the two days of Wordpress geekery that will be WordCamp UK. It’s to be held at The Studio (formerly the Orange Studio) just off New St in Birmingham. Saturday and Sunday 19th & 20thof July

I’ll be there, hanging around the “break out room” (or bar) for the most part, and so will around 100 or so or the UKs most passionate Wordpress users. Here’s the event on upcoming.

I’m trying to organise some sort of social events around the weekend, an informal drinky-poos for those in town on the Friday and something more involved on the Saturday night. Any ideas or offers of help are welcome (email me or have a splurge on the wiki)

Birmingham City Council progressively decided that they would livestream their local election results, which was more of an invitation than us politically-interested twitters needed to provide a ‘backchannel’. Having decided to base round the hashtag #brumcc (a few test tweets fired off as people voted in the day), it all kicked off around 10.25 with a very geeky moan about the format for the streaming (Windows Movie Player) and the standard of the the sound (there was a problem with the gain on the wireless mic I think).

The actual conversation bounced between pub-style debate, willful surrealism, and the kind of listening and reacting to the actual words that microblogging really helps — collating the “did he really just say that?” factor between other viewers rather than waiting for the host to pick the politician up.

Four hours of it made us all flag, but it really was a worthwhile experience and in two years (when the local elections come around again) I really hope the council harness the conversation in some way too. It doesn’t have to be twitter (which, considering the UK local elections borked it, may not be around) but it was really powerful - and if publicised widely could be really useful.

I’ve been searching for the Holy Grail of social media crossposting – a Facebook status that is a tweet announcing a blog post auto-generated from del.icio.us links – and here is one:

I will not use twitter, tumblr or my facebook news feed to announce a new blog post.

Who’s with me?

[EDIT] I also vow to keep twitter and Facebook statues separate. (Thanks Si, although that’s a harder one).

The reason is that I don’t want to contibute to the “background noise” I describe here.

I was pleased to be asked, and am now one of the Birmingham Post’s bloggers on its newly relaunched website. Despite the hallowed environs of the mainstream press it’s not a paid gig – so why am I doing it? And more to the point what am I doing in the Lifestyle section?

Adding another blog to write for wasn’t really the aim, hell I could start another in a second on any topic I wanted. there was, however, something exciting about writing for a different audience. The Post as a local broadsheet is quite an odd beast, one that I’ve admired but never really engaged with because of how poor their web-outing was (a man can only read so many papers without a commute). I’m guessing that the new site will introduce a fair number of people to blogs, people who– rightly – aren’t excited by the “a kind of online diary” thing that sections of the media still use.

So, Lifestyle? Well, I won’t be writing about alternative medicine, or shoes (except maybe the odd fantastic pair of pumps), I’m currently thinking that my aim here is to write more informed pieces about the stuff I normally go on about. Something halfway between here and BiNS, intelligent, modern, culture stuff with an interweb slant. I don’t intend to modify my style, or re-hash other stuff. The first post was a odd one, as it had to be written before the site was live, I’m not sure how reading the other blogs on the site will affect future stuff.

It’s also exciting that the people working on the Post, and the site, have really taken the internet to be something different to the paper. Joanna Geary was terrified of blogging only a couple of months ago, but she’s recruited and started off a whole host of bloggers for the section.

Oh, and they use Movable Type, something I’ve never had a go of before, which is nice.

I spent an enjoyable hour or so today talking about blogs in a way I hadn’t really considered before. A TV company are hoping to make a programme or programmes based around Reading (no not the Berkshire town) - and had for some reason asked me to contribute to a ‘taster’ version (I’m, guessing a short non-broadcast pilot to show commissioning types).

I knew it was aimed at children, so went through my Google Reader looking for blogs that might be relevant to kids - some animal nonsense, music and sport mainly - but really thought that I’d be trotting out the usual stuff about democracy, speed, obsessions, the usual “why do people blog?” stuff. Maybe in a slightly more simple way.

It turned out the way the programme is structured is to encourage people to read, and it doesn’t matter what (within some reason I suppose), and so after a very quick introduction I spent time reading from a few favourite blogs (Cute Overload, Oh and Flying Saucer) that might appeal to kids. And then saying “this is what I’m reading in 2008″.

It was an odd experience to think of blogs divorced, almost, from their context and as pieces of writing alone. The two more text based blogs stood up well, CO not such much - although it was fun to say “snorgling” to a TV camera – but I realised that I don’t think of blogs so much as pieces of writing – more as information.

Information that I can get quickly, information that I understand the context of, information from sources I either trust or know exactly how I don’t. There are blogs that I don’t have much interest in subject-wise, but enjoy the writing – Flying Saucer a case in point there – but they’re not what I immediately espouse as the value of the blog.

Just something I found interesting really, and I will ponder more on.

I spend a very interesting and informative night at the first Birmingham Bloggers meet-up. It was interesting as the people who turned up were connected only in that they wrote (or really liked) blogs and they lived near enough to Birmingham.

So blogs and Birmingham was the main conversation that seemed to emerge. Which kind of alienates those that blog, but not about Brum - of course not all bloggers blog directly about their lives or the place that they live, most have an angle or a subject.

Everyone seemed interested in somehow improving the visibility of Brum blogging tho - to wit Dave decided to build Brum Search (based on Google), and over at nunovo there’s much talk of Rivers of Brum. There was also much general consensus over the use of “birminghamUK” as a more general tag - so I’ve expanded the scope of upyerbrum to bring through anything tagged that onto its front page (although only items tagged “upyerbrum” get automatically added to the digg-style voting pages).