BloggingBrum

I wasn’t going to post about this event, mainly due to the fact that it wasn’t very interesting. A debate about why we should care about creativity in the West Midlands, you would have thought, might include discussion about the region, the towns, the cities… Or then again, maybe you would expect a Birmingham centric discussion and how it compares to other cities…well, London anyway.

Maybe the title was somewhat misleading. I gathered that by “creativity” they meant the creative industries, because creativity to me, stretches beyond art. I don’t think the debate would have focussed on the creative identity of the West Midlands because I’m not sure anybody knows what it is.

Maybe the debate could have been a chance to explore the regional differences / parallels and find out about projects and ideas that are happening. Discover common ground and perhaps gather new ideas, all the time building an idea of a creative West Midlands identity. If that happened then maybe we would start to realise what we have regionally, celebrate it, nurture it and stop trying to be something else.

While I live in Birmingham, I was born in Wolverhampton and spent most of life growing up in Walsall so I think of myself as from the West Midlands. There is plenty of grassroots creative / artistic stuff going on that documents life in the region (and as a photographer, I like to include myself in that bracket). Maybe all this creativity is being debated and monitored, reviewed and documented….. Maybe it isn’t, I don’t know. but last nights debate didn’t do what it said on the tin.

Hello!
Ok, so the title pretty much sums it up..I want to blog… and I have a few things that i’d like to blog about. The current hype and hoohar regarding this whole social media malarky. How does it relate to me and how can I be involved in both a community and business sense?
I have a lot questions floating around my head which i’m trying to prioritise..Now that is proving pretty tricky as I am in the throws of organising my wedding in May, expecting a baby in August (we, not me!) and just starting out as a pro photographer. But we don’t need to get into the personal stuff here… or at least not right now.
My ramblings tend to dodge and weave through the points i’m trying to make and tangent off, just so you know.. but yeah, the big social media buzz….
I haven’t had chance to meet up and chat with fellow advocates of “the scene” as yet. I follow a few folks on Twitter, I’ve subscribed to blogs that are relevant to me but i’m still to find my feet in the blogging world. I see the potential, so much so, I started a club for folks interested but on a more local level. If there’s one thing I’ve found so far with the current scenario, is that it seems a tad centralised. And I don’t think i’m the only one who is wondering how best we can benefit from these social media tools. Yes we can use them, but for what purpose…what’s the goal here?

I’m gonna stop here because I don’t want to waffle on too much. Sorry if my grammar is a little suspect, it’s just the way it comes out…