I’ve been meaning to write something up about all those guest posts that we had on CiB throughout March.
I thought it went very well. Alex was organising all of that so I had no real idea of what was going to go up on the site each day. By and large I was pretty darn impressed with what we got.
If you missed the series, here’s what we had in date order:
- Design Space: Bringing New Talent to Birmingham by Miriam Rowe
- Fairtrade Jumpers for Goalposts by Marcus Belben
- New Light Through Old Windows by James Kennedy
- A remedy for cold climate cuts: enterprise and ingenuity in the Midlands’ creative industries by Laura Katriina Pollard
- Phase 2 by Ronan Fitzgerald
- Contemporary music in Birmingham by Tabitha McGrath
- Jack Wooley Was A Stirchley Boy by Tom Cahill-Jones
- Birmingham, The Beat Begins by Milo McGuinness and Liz Hoare
- Sabbaticals – and why they rock! by Sam Underwood
- Theatre + Technology = ? by Katie Day
- In the Middle of Somewhere by David Green
- Birmingham Music Scene by Rich Batsford
- I hate the ‘community’ by Danny Smith
- St Patrick’s Parade, Digbeth by William Fallows
- Collaborations and partnerships in Birmingham by Simon Wales
- Books by Charlie Hill
The thing that interested me most about going back through these is the format most people adopted. Most people went for the long-form, text-centric article, with only William Fallows doing something a little different. Also, most posts were illustrated with photos but nobody embedded any video or music – even the folks talking exclusively about music.
I’m not going to pick favourites, but I was particularly interested by the posts from William Fallows, Laura Katriina Pollard and Miriam Rowe – in the case of the latter two it was because they introduced me to some things I wasn’t aware of, which is what I’d like to think CiB is all about. I thought it was interesting how Rich Batsford canvassed a wider spread of opinion for his too.
The reason I’ve always shied away from encouraging guest posts is that I think it’s healthier if people write on their own sites and build up their own archives and audiences. I’d like to think that, if I was aware of people writing the kind of thing they submitted on their own blogs, I’d have linked to them from here anyway, sending them readers who might explore their websites etc and so on.
Incidentally, of the people who answered our initial call out, we accepted pretty much everyone who had a reasonably definite idea of something to write about.
So, thanks to all our guest posters. We might do this again sometime.