Pete kicked off discussions about how to follow on from the CiB Shop, The Little Chill looked like fun and involved pretty much every promoter in town and Supersonic’s line-up started coming together.

There was a lot of kerfuffle around the filming of Turbulence, with lots of people getting involved in that too, and people seemed to be printing big flyers for things. I didn’t make it to Taste of Birmingham but people tell me it was pretty good. We also flagged up the work of Sweaty Eskimo.

BARG announced some fun and games at the Mac, Haji Noor Deen visited The Hubb, the Cut Out Shop folks made The DIY Times and I did a bit of a write-up from the BE Festival. New Art Gallery Walsall hosted the Taylor Wessing Photography Prize for a while and the entirely excellent-looking Six Summer Saturdays started.

There was news of cuts from the new government and I tried to wrap my head around the mess that was being made of sorting out a LEP for Birmingham/West Midlands. The flyering/postering issue got another run out too.

Birmingham didn’t get the nod for City of Culture 2013. Ah well.

The Created in Birmingham closed its shutters for the last time at the end of the month. Someone kissed the feedback book:

International Dance Festival Birmingham came to an end too, while Ian looked forward to what was in store at the 2010 BASS Festival and I had a peek at the Lichfield Festival’s line-up.

RoguePlay left the Custard Factory, I noticed Writing West Midlands for the first time, Ikon announced their series of ‘Favourite Things’ talks, the Daze-Ray exhibition occupied a corner of the Jewellery Quarter and IPEX took over the NEC.

hobbypopMUSEUM spent some time at Eastside Projects, the annual Cure Leukemia Art Auction took place, Ben Javens made a tea towel, end-of-year-show season started up and there was a photography exhibition at the Custard Factory.

I went to visit the flashy gizmos at University of Birmingham’s Heritage and Culture Learning Hub too.

The CiB Shop window was jazzed up with the help of Birmingham Royal Ballet, Art Detection Services set up their workshop in store and Shady Bird popped by to play a set. In other CiB news, CiBmail was launched.

The Rainbow announced their plans for developments and expansion both upstairs and below, we said goodbye to more independent record shops and sampad celebrated their 20th anniversary.

Trove showed some science, we had a nosey at CBSO’s summer programme and some behind the scenes footage from The Electric showed up.

Not My Type brought together “a veritable who’s who of Brum talent” (to quote myself) and, in other illustration-related news, the Love To Print crowd released Patterns #1.

Other things to look back on and go ‘oh yeah, I remember that’ include Such Tweet Sorrow, BAP’s document on Birmingham’s Creative Capital, the Big Culture Blog and a call for “more of the Simon Rattle effect”. Also, In Our Backyard looked interesting and Chris Bates made a video for Munchbreak’s Television:

Congratulations were given to Raphael Selbourne for winning the 2009 Costa First Novel Award and we came across The Music Quarter, a new music blog.

Hustle made the move to the Midlands, we had a giggle with Kipple and the Emerging Festivals Fund was announced, with some of the fruits of that being revealed towards the middle part of the year. Leftfoot started their 10th birthday celebrations and our most popular post of the year was published.

Ian joined the CiB team, we got the first glimpse of WeVee and plans were announced for the CiB shop

We also waved hello to Jane Anderson, Mark Wilkinson, Lucy Pryor, Phill Blake, Helen Flanagan, Sarah Lynch, Jade Sukiya, Jodi Ann Bickley, Leon Sparkes and Luke Halliley.

We also said farewell to Neil Farrington.

Meanwhile, just to show how 2010 looked on Created in Birmingham, we published 649 blog posts and attracted 578 comments, garnering 222,264 pageviews from 81,937 unique (like snowflakes) visitors. There was also 1 shop that took £45,000, with most of that money going to the artists themselves.

Over the past 12 months we’ve also had 40 CiB supporters and a handful of advertisers – a big thank you goes out to them for helping us to keep the site going.

These were the 10 most popular posts published this year:

1. Apache Indian has his own bar
2. Recommended BCC arts cuts (possibly)
3. CiB Shop – The End Game
4. Coming (very) soon – the CiB Shop
5. CiB Shop – here’s how you can get involved
6. CiB Shop – an invitation
7. Birmingham arts and arts grant budgets for 2011/12
8. Factory Club closing down
9. The HMV Institute
10. The Radar Magazine

I’m not really one for doing ‘best of’s but (off the top of my head) it was good to see the MAC reopening, I liked the Steve McCurry retrospective at BMAG and Len Lye at Ikon (which is still on), Birmingham European Theatre Festival was fun and I enjoyed a load of things at International Dance Festival Birmingham.

Odd but great moments included ‘sleeping’ on stage during Stan’s Cafe‘s Tuning Out with Radio Z (which I’ve written about here) and, of course, That Shop.

There was plenty more besides and far too many things I wish I’d seen but didn’t. I suppose I’ll just have to try to see more next year.

Yesterday we had Shady Bard playing in the Created in Birmingham shop. Here’s 26 minutes of their set (before the batteries in my camera ran out…)

Matt Murtagh was on hand with his camera.

Thanks loads to Shady Bard for turning our shop into a venue for an hour.