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.

mac have commissioned some new Stan’s Cafe which is being performed there from Thurs to Sat and then touring later in the year.

Tuning Out with Radio Z is best described by they themselves:

The hosts of the night time show Tuning Out know all about facing down the void. Each night they start the show blank, with nothing planned, armed with just a stack of charity shop records and six hours in which to calm the world’s chaos and settle its people down to sleep.

This is a theatre show, which is also a radio show. You can listen to Tuning Out at home on-line via our website but true excitement comes when you visit its extraordinary studio in the theatre and become privy to presenter’s deeply compromised off-mic World.

Here’s the Radio Z website. You can sign in to the News Room bit and, during the performance, interact with things, send messages and so on.

There’ll be a pre-show talk with James Yarker at 6pm on the Friday to discuss the show. I wouldn’t be surprised if the development of this show had something to do (at least in part) with commentating on a Scalextric race for 24 hours last year, but you never can tell.