Off the subject

I am going to leave the subject of grassroots football for this one.

Last night I had the pleasure of meeting Jon Bounds. Yes, I have to admit until recently it wasn’t a name that I was familiar with. But Jon is one of Birmingham’s bloggers extraordinaire and hosts the site “Birmingham:It’s not shit“.

Another admission is that until recently I had no real desire to get into the whole blogging thing. I am reasonably Internet-savvy, setting up a few very simple websites myself through Googlepages, but no expert. However it was the conversations of Jason Norris (The Graduate Apprentice web blog) and Ruth Ward, after her visit to a digital media festival in the US that got might interest aroused. My brother (definitely an IT whiz) used to keep a blogin the first year he escaped this country to go to Canada and that was a cracking read. So I thought I would give it ago and I am still going several weeks and getting in to it more. Ok, so I will never be a Jon Bounds, but then again his site is a full-time hobby! Taking up 20 hours a week.  

 So how come I got to meet Mr Bounds? Well he was one of three panelist at Birmingham Future’s Big Brand Debate: Is Birmingham A Second City? In essence it was asking should we be using the idea of being the “second” city of the UK to market the city to all and sundry. True to form, Jon summarises the debate much more eloquently then I could ever do. However one comment that he did make last night and didn’t pick up in his blog that I thought  of interest was in relation to the current Nike TV ad that has Liverpudlians talking in Spanish. Jon’s point was, if you have seen the advert, you will see that other than promoting Nike, it does an excellent job of promoting the Liverpool and its communities. Is there any personality that has a link to Birmingham that could do the same for this city? I think not. And that was his point. We are lacking in anything particularly iconic that isn’t rigid and fixed to the ground. Jasper Carrot, sorry, doesn’t count.