I’m just dealing with the handover of this blog to an incoming group of contributors, so apologies again for the lack of posts. If you’re annoyed that I haven’t been able to promote your thing recently then, well, I’ll leave that one to Janet. The new lot are going to be great though, I can feel it in my bones.
Anyway, quite a lot of people got in touch saying they’d be interested in contributing and I only wanted to pick a handful this time round. Thing is, I reckon all of the people I turned down would be great at blogging about creative stuff around Birmingham. Really great.
Thing is though, the whole point of CiB was to show that it’s now ridiculously simple and cheap to publish info online and build your own audience for that – there’s no need to focus on the limited number of incumbent publishers. The idea was that once enough people saw that there would be tens of CiBs and this site wouldn’t be needed anymore. Instead, CiB has become one of the limited number of incumbents.
There are literally dozens of people out there who have said that they’d be prepared to do some regular writing. Imagine if they all had their own sites – all writing about different things in different ways, linking to each other, competing with each other and making this site gloriously obsolete.
So basically, I’d love it if the people who asked to contribute to CiB started their own websites and talked about what’s happening in Birmingham in their own way.
Sure, to start with you wouldn’t have the audience that this site has, but that’ll come – it took this site ages but could be done much quicker now, if that’s what you want. If you want to get started but don’t know how or you fancy a helping hand of some sort – maybe someone to help share the load or bring complementary skills – then leave a comment below and we’ll see if we can match you up.
Otherwise, I’d recommend you head to wordpress.com or Tumblr, sign up for a free blog and get started. The more the merrier, I say.