Meanwhile, City Neighborhood Posters by Ork caught my eye because it looks familiar. If you read the Literary Birmingham part of the Unfinished Business post, you’ll see a clear typographical resemblance between Jenny Beorkrem’s work and Katy Parry’s.

Something’s happening here.
Is it a new trend in typocartography?
Or does it go back to previous decades?
Are these design ideas occurring separately and spontaneously, or is one influenced by another?

For me, I reckon that if Jenny can flog posters of US cities, then it can work here too.

Each blue bit fits into one of the brown bits.

It’s tricky identifying some of the states. 30% of California and New York has been excised. The urban areas aren’t so easily identified with one city. It looksl ike northwestern New York state has been removed as one - which would mean Buffalo, Rochester, and a bunch of smaller cities.

Still, and interesting exercise, and one with further creative possibilities.

Rather than delay any longer, I’m going to combine the unfinished posts. This is a bit like the way lots of other people do a ‘Links I’ve Seen’ page. It’s a roundup of things that I can’t give full attention to. These three are substantially under way. There are others that haven’t got this far, that are only assembled in my mind.

Literary Birmingham

Way back in March I started looking for ways to make a map of the city using text for lines. The idea was prompted by these maps of St. Petersburg and San Francisco, by Katy Parry’s design for a CiB charity campaign and by various thoughts about text and mapping like this post about Thomas Jefferson using a cut-up technique 150 years before William Burroughs got around to it.

Except that they are mostly blocks of text. I was thinking of something more like a map using road names as lines.

But that gets awkward, as the streets get longer.

So I tried waterways and narratives about them.

This works a little bit better, but I still need to find sentences long enough to do the roads. The map becomes a narrative - a songline - to recite as a way of tracing the city.

So I started looking for evocative passages, and this is where an encyclopaedic knowledge of Birmingham’s literary culture and heritage come in, because that’s what’s needed in order to thresh out the evocative bits from all the other mentions of street names. But guess what I don’t have. My knowledge of this stuff stops at about 1880. So the available resources are being queried: ye intrewebs, the Central Library literature section, and local cultural mavens.

Pretty quick like a few items, authors, and resources popped up.

Birmingham Goldsmith by Sue Hubbard, this bit about Conroy Maddox,

and then I got stuck into drawing.

… and that’s as far as I got in writing it up. There’s more material on my hard drive, but no time for it.

On to the next bit of unfinished business.

Granarian Birmingham

There are many reasons to visit Birmingham’s seasonal Frankfurt Market - and I can think of exactly two.

First there’s the ambience. It’s nice to wander around among the people. They’re having a good time, probably in just the same way, although various of them are also buying things. It’s a simple pleasure, and since it’s damn near impossible to get anywhere in a hurry, or in a straight line, the enforced leisure is a good thing.

Second, there’s the opportunity to see and acquire things. I like to see the space lit up. Birmingham has done very well with theTown Hall lighting, and had a nice Eastside lighting festival in 2006. So when I’m in town and it’s dark outside, I prop my camera on something and get a few snaps of this scene or variants thereof. I particularly like catching the moon in passing.

But there’s one thing about the German Market that it alone can do, and that’s provide this bread.

… which is where this has halted.

I meant to get this next one out in early November. I failed.

Political Geography

This story starts in the US, but is relevant to us here too.

To help kick off the US version of Geography Awareness Week (whereas the UK version is set out here), National Geographic invited all 100 U.S. Senators to draw a map of their home state from memory. So I’m thinking, if I wanted to suggest a parallel activity here, what would it be?

It’s a bit tricky. For starters, there’s a question of whether the separate countries of Britain would be the best parallel, or whether it should be regions or even counties? Then there’s the question of an equivalent to Senators. In the US system, each of the 50 states elect two Senators (and a varying number of Representatives). The British system, especially since devolution, has no similar setup. So I’d need some other way of figuring out an equivalent. Since MP’s are the nearest equivalent, one solution is to do is ask them to draw the boundaries of their constituencies.

By and large I’d expect them to know the boundaries, because constituency boundaries are subject to change every few years through Boundary Commission review, and every MP is bound to keep up to date with those. The next boundary change will be within a year, at the date of the next general election. Those changes were set out some time ago, and prospective candidates will have memorised them - perhaps to the point of being able to draw an outline.

Let’s have a look at the current and future boundaries for the constituency I’m in.

I live in Moseley, which is currently in the Selly Oak constituency, but as of next election, will be part of Hall Green constituency. The map on the left is how it was at the last election; on the right is at the next election. The red dot is the junction of Vicarage Road and the High Street in Kings Heath. The junction stays where it is, but the name of the place changes from Selly Oak to Hall Green, as does the political profile. (Go here to see the boundaries for your area).

As mentioned, it’s pretty likely that each of the current candidates (…, ) already knows the outline of this place.

The request says

This application is for the installation of three temporary large format PVC mesh banners, including advertisements, attached to scaffolding on the north, west and south elevations of the Beneficial Building. The banners would display a 1:1 image of the building underneath, whilst renovation and re-cladding works are taking place.

Here are the North and West elevations.

Planning guidance ’states that advertisements can be controlled, ‘in the interests of amenity and public safety’. When considering amenity, paragraph 11 notes that regard should be paid to the advertisement’s effect on the appearance of the building, the visual amenity in the immediate neighbourhood and the cumulative impact the advertisement
would have on its surroundings’.

So what happens a lot of times is that the banner is just a huge photo of the building - which is pretty cool. But what if the banner were more like experimental art? Or a photo of something else? Do you think it would be worth writing to the Planning Committee to see if they would ask the builder to do something a bit more creative? Do you think the builder might actually grab the opportunity to work with local creatives - thereby upping their social status? If so, get writing!

I set these up in 2008 after my Drupal installation was attacked by spambots, and had intended to develop a multiblog covering 3-5 different areas of interest. The interim solution was to set up 4 separate blogs and see how they fared. I didn’t have the knowledge to set up one blog with multiple posting divisions. But that seems to have been addressed - in Wordpress at least - by multiblog adaptations like WPMU , WP Hive , Virtual Multiblog and Multiply . The idea is to have one interface, and one administrator account, but multiple ‘main’ sections, like a newspaper or magazine with internal divisions for News, Society, Science, and so on.

I believe that an easy alternative is to use posting categories, but this doesn’t produce a graphic layout like the one below.

So sometime this year - sooner or later - the existing sites will come down, then be replaced with something more manageable, more effective.

Del.icio.us : design, format, management, website
Technorati : design, format, management, website

The Scores on the Door rating scheme is apparently nationwide, and is set up to list places based on a variety of criteria. It lists 158 0-rated kitchens in Birmingham. It provides a map for each one, but doesn’t show the entire group. So I copied the list, did a bit of work on it, then ran it through Batch GeoCoder. The result is a geographical distribution that doesn’t reveal any distinct concentrations of poorly-rated kitchens. There are some blankspots of interest, such as Hall Green and Kingstanding - which might mean there are no restaurants, or that those areas have higher quality kitchens than elsewhere.

But what struck me most was the number of well known or favourite eateries on the list: Mr Egg, Canal Side Cafe Gas Street, K2 Restaurant, and The Sunflower Lounge. The Canalside Cafe being one of my favourites. On that basis I’m wondering what criteria are used in rating the kitchens, and whether there are things I’d disregard one way or another.

I wish the Scores on the Door people would provide the complete dataset — or subsets thereof — via the website, so that mashups would be easier. I may go back to get each of the higher rankings and pass those through Batch GeoCoder as well.

Del.icio.us : food BirminghamUK restaurant hygiene ratings mapping
Technorati : food BirminghamUK restaurant hygiene ratings mapping

I’d like to make three broad comments, but they have to be brief as I’m woozy from lack o’ sleep. 1 & 2: Perceptions of friendliness online and in person are unpredictable. 3: Blogs are for working out what one wants to say, regardless of audience.

A bit more detail: while writing does have an etiquette of its own, it shouldn’t be mistaken for other sorts of interaction, e.g. f2f, phone. Different expectations and different sensitivities apply in each.

Some people are great at coming across well online, and lousy in person. Vice versa too, as your remarks about Richard indicate. It’s the same when going from voice to print. If you consider what Richard says at about 6:30 about why bothering and dead wood, and how that would come across in print, it’s easy to see why readers might misinterpet his intent.

Similarly, I gather that my own style of writing is a turn off for some people, but the flip side of that is the difficulties I’ve seen in f2f conversations among people who obviously don’t understand each other and cannot communicate. On the whole, communication is best in established relationships where people have done a certain amount of exploring and negotiating. On line or off. Aside from that it’s unpredictable. So I reckon the three key points to web-based communication are: make a bit of effort to be polite; maintain an open mind about other people; speak your mind without fear of misinterpretation. Let the cards fall where they may.

Again, top stuff. Thanks for keeping it interesting.

What I want to achieve will be obvious to many, so I am not going to spell it out in any detail, except to say how I arrived at this particular phrase. Initially it seemed that the phrase ‘Best UK blog’ might be appropriate because it is short and already widely used. But that latter quality may also keep it from appearing in search results.

So I considered a couple of other phrases and the number of results each brought in a search.

‘Best UK blog’ returned 19 million results;

‘Best UK blog 2008′ returned 46 million results;

‘Best British blog 2008′ returned 14 million results;

‘Best British blog contest 2008′ returned 425,000 results

‘Best blog UK contest 2008′ returned 600,000 results.

It’s clear that the phrase ‘Best British blog contest 2008‘ will be the easiest one to effect; the phrase most likely to show up in search results when copied by relatively few people.

It is also the link to the CiB page describing this year’s weblog contest. It means that anyone searching for all of those words should come across a link to that page fairly quickly. (Some people will know the nickname for that process, but I’m not going to mention it here.)

So I’m hoping a bunch of bloggers will copy the link above into a blog post of their own between now and Tuesday January 13; that search results will reflect that link, and that it will prompt more people to vote in that contest. It might even get to the point where Best British blog 2008 becomes an accurate link.

PS: it seems a bit odd to be voting on last year’s best blog. Here we are in 2009, so nominating and voting for a 2008 effort seems strange. I guess it’s just belated recognition for having done good last year.

First this shows up as Sarkozy attempts to recast himself in Obama’s image.

Then commercial America gets the right idea and adds the appropriate tag line: 20% off!

I’m wondering why Darling & Brown didn’t appropriate the graphic scheme for promoting the VAT cut.