We help people in deprived or isolated communities
around the country to find a voice online for their community,
so that they can talk about what they are doing to the wider world
and not be smothered by local political interests or local newspapers.
We help people find a powerful find a powerful
respected voice online. Now, we set up
in Birmingham basically because of things like this
Social Media Cafe. When I was going round the country a
few years ago, raising money to try and start a business,
it was coming to Birmingham and seeing this fantastic
underground social media scene that goes on here in Birmingham,
whether it's huge activity that goes on on flickr, or on facebook
or in twitter, or in the amazing hyper local blogs here in Birmingham.
And so that why we raised money here and decided to set up here.
Birmingham Social Media Cafe Birmingham, you are in Wired,
in the recent edition of Wired. I don't know if anyone has
spotted that. It has a big league table of social media meet ups
around the country and Birmingham is sitting in there slightly
above the middle for the size of the SMC. I've been working
in Birmingham for about 2 and half years, it's been a fantastic
experience. I've worked with quite a few people here in the room.
You are very lucky to have some excellent academic
institutions here that are not just leading in the UK, but leading
in the world in issues such as date and local journalism.,
around BCU in particular. In fact Paul has brought some of
his students and we have academics like Dave,
not really an academic though Dave. Dave: "Blogger first"
Yes, blogger first, academic second. And we always happy
to talk to anyone as a business. Nicky Getgood is here. Karen who
works with me. We have the remarkable Mike Rawlins. Give us
a wave Mike. I know you want to. Michael, it turns out is an
artists model! If you see his latest blog post, he's an artists model
from his early work on the internet. You'd never know just looking at him.
He was younger and more beautiful I think then.
Mike: "Just think yourselves lucky it wasn't Lucian Freud"
We are always happy to talk to anyone who wants to
to get into the hyperlocal scene, who wants to find out about
self publishing on the internet. We try and run as a public
service business, which is that we raise money
from big corporate clients and any surplus we make goes
back into helping people in communities or just helping
the scene as a whole. We are very interested over the next
few months in working with people in Birmingham on
new forms of local media ownership, very interested in seeing
if we can create some sort of media co-operative here in
Birmingham genuinely owned by the people, broadly based that
has nothing whatever to do with traditional local television or
the radio, but it comes from the web but is owned by the
people that create the content. And that's about it really
I'm around if you want to talk to me about anything at all.
Or any of the team. And just get on and enjoy the coffee.
And thank you to Karen by the way for organising this
and persevering.