So Peter Hain has been forced to resign, let’s hope enough credit is given to the blogosphere, i.e. Guido, for finding and pursuing this story. No word on Sky or the Beeb yet, obviously.

Today I was talking to the Black Country Chamber of Commerce about their plans to get the region officially recognised by the Ordinance Survey maps.

The hardest part of the whole business is deciding what and where the Black Country actually is though. Although it’s obviously got it’s own identity - probably more so than the surrounding areas of other cities of similar size.

I don’t know about Gateshead or Salford being so keen to distance themselves from their larger conurbations to nearly the same extent as the Black Country seems to.

I’m a relative newcomer to the West Midlands, so all these references to yam yams, Slade, bostin, faggots and peas, brummagem and the like passes over my head a bit. So someone take a guess, help me out: where does Birmingham end and the Black Country start? And why is it so important to everyone?

Well after getting the tip off that Brokeback Mountain actor Heath Ledger has died, (from Jo Geary) myself and a Birmingham Post colleague were doing a quick, small, and slightly drunk straw poll at the Fighting Cocks, Moseley. (more to come in the Pint-sized blog eventually).

We were trying to find out exactly who is interested in breaking news, i.e. would they care to know that Ledger is dead. Unfortunately, of the people asked, no one seemed to be interested, and of the people who knew who Heath Ledger was, they didn’t seem to be bothered about the news, saying they’d probably pick it up in the morning on telly or newspapers. A slightly disappointing result for those of us committed to breaking online news.

Or maybe just a lesson about doing media research while drinking…

Very few, it seems, and certainly nothing particulary tangible. This has already been discussed on some of the usual places but I’ve been writing and talking to people about it all day (see in full here and here), so I’ve decided to stick my oar in anyway.

One thing that seems to come up a lot is that people can’t seem to see any actual benefit to it. From talking to a number of people round Birmingham - and also at the Ironbridge Gorge WH site over in Shropshire, it seems that the only benefits anyone mentions in increased tourism, and some kind of nebulous “community” spirit.

Of course no-one can really predict the effect that the extra exposure this might have on tourism numbers, extra shoppers, that sort of thing, but given that the vast majority of people don’t even know much about what WHSs are, it can’t be that much of a pull. THe head of the Ironbridge WH site even said to me that there aren’t many in the world that this makes any difference to.

And in terms of a community spirit… The WHS classification gives very little actual legal protection or guidance, if any, to an area. In terms of creating and protecting communities in Birmingham, that’s a job for the people that live and work in them, not the UN.

And the most important thing: this is just absolutely not going to happen, apart from anything else. To become a WHS, this would have to be approved by the planning committe, the full council, English Heritage and the Department of Culture Media and Sport, beating the likes of Shakespeare’s Stratford. It ain’t gonna happen. And it’s hard not to be cynical and wonder if this is just a big plug for the Quarter without much intention of it working - viral marketing from the council?

I’m planning to go out there some time soon to re-start the sadly neglected pint-sized blog I write, which was going great guns until work and Christmas just took it over.

I’ve blogged before about what I want to do with this site, and one of the things I’d like would be a feed of my articles in the Post, just to show readers what I’ve been up to at work, and so readers of the paper Post know they’re getting their 70p’s worth.

 Unfortunately the Post website as it is doesn’t support anything so fancy-dan as a newsfeed, and in fact doesn’t even have every article that goes in the paper on it. All this is to change when the new website is brought in in a month or so, I’m sure.

But until then I’ve decided to create an archive of my work as a blog, just so I can keep track of all my articles without having to keep huge piles of paper if nothing else. I’ve set it up as sort of a “dummy” blog (although anyone’s welcome to comment if they’d like), and you may have noticed a new link to the last 10 stories I wrote for our esteemed organ over there on the right if you’re on my blog.

This is obviously mainly for my benefit, rather than readers, but I hope this helps all the Tom Scotney news junkies out there, if such a thing exists - unlikely I know. I think it shows quite how versatile many Web 2.0 applications are. I was briefly discussing the use of Twitter with blogger Pete Ashton yesterday, talking about how versatile it is, and this is just another use of modern web technology in a way it maybe wasn’t originally designed for.

First up: the Birmingham band taking reggae to Lithuania, which I shamelessly appropriated for the Post after hearing about it from Spaghetti Gazetti. Hopefully this will give me the chance to give credit where credit’s due as well

As the enterprise editor of the Birmingham Post, I try to cover as many of the issues relating to startups and small and medium enterprises in the weekly enterprise section of the paper as possible. But I also do case studies of a lot of small businesses in the region.

Now I’m trying to take that one step further, as well as create something that would hopefully be a good read for anyone interested in the problems of starting and running your own business. I’m hoping to find an entrepreneur/just-started business who wants to work with me on a regular series of articles (monthly perhaps) giving a diary of the highs and lows they face running their business.

Obviously monthly (or whatever) updates in the paper can only go into so much detail, so I’m hoping that whoever I might be able to get involved will be keen to run a blog (with me or by themself) to go into more details of the say-to-day problems faced by small business owners in these difficult economic times.

If you know - or if you are - someone who’d be interested in taking part in this, or if you’ve got any comments or suggestions, it’d be great to hear from you, either here, or at my work contact details: tom_scotney@mrn.co.uk, 0121 234 5576/5506

I’ve always been a bit unsure about the obsession with the mobile phone as a platform for internet use. Until today, when I lost my phone, and realised quite how much of my day-to-day web use goes through it.

Now I realise that in a world of genocide, terrorism, warmongering, poverty, starvation, global warming and the rest it seems like the height of selfishness to complain about being denied the use of my Sony Eriksson for a while, but there you go.

Back to the point. In the fabulous world of the Birmingham Post I have to go to a special computer in the corner to use anything vaguely Web 2.0-related, as it’s the only one that’ll run it. And when I got there today (after a very hard day’s work naturally) I was presented with the dispiriting sight of approximately several thousand posts to read through, making me realise quite how much time I spend going through Google Reader on the phone in an average day, just filling up the gaps in the day checking the latest news, leaving comments, updating my facebook or checking email.

So it turns out I was wrong, mobile phone internet does have some use to people - me particularly. I’d be interested to hear anyone else’s views on how much they use the little internet button on their phone? What for?

One of the many lines of new media organisations seems to be integrating the mobile phone network under their umbrella and targeting mobile phone users as well as paper readers, website visitors etc. Looking at the number of people wandering round the streets glued to their mobiles it’s easy to see why.

But are any of these people using the internet or is it all about text and camera pictures? I want to find out how people use their phones, and what they actually want in terms of interactive mobile services from media organisations.

Ever since I was first turned on to Google Reader, I’ve not even thought of going back to the programs (feedreader etc) I was on before, or manually shuffling through my favourites with a browser, as I did at first. Google’s made it infinitely easier for me to go through blog posts, reading or saving the ones I like and ignoring the ones that don’t look much fun.

The main problem I’m having is keeping track of comments left on posts I read. Often, especially on heated talking shops like Samizdata, Commentisfree and Harry’s Place, the discussion,bitching and flamewars are as much fun, if not more fun than, the original article.

But the problem is, I never seem to see these any more, because Google is just too damn efficient. Sometimes I’ll get a counter saying how mamy comments there are on a post, more often not, but regardless, as I check the thing fairly regularly, I usually pick up blog posts fairly soon after they’re written, before a good wodge of commentary has had a chance to build them. And once they’re read, there are just so many other posts coming through on Reader that I’m too busy going through interesting new ones to check back manually on how the old ones are doing.

It’s especially annoying if I’ve got involved myself at all, and have to keep pointing my browser back every time I remember about it, just to see how things have developed. There must be a better solution!

Any suggestions?

Well I was relaxing at home this morning, indulging in a healthy does of consumer porn (i.e. this month’s GQ, admiring all the aspiring lifestyle stuff I will never be able to afford).

Reading through some of my backblog (backlog of… well never mind you get the point, inventing silly internet buzzwords is harder than it seems), it turns out “celebrity interviewer” Rob McGibbon has launched an archive of interviews, sorted by subject, publication, date and interviewer.

Seems the idea is eventually to build up to a database of interviews going back into the prehistory of journalism if possible. All very laudable, and the kind of thing that makes you wish you’d thought of it first.

One thing I can fairly confidently predict about the future of his site is that he’ll be unlikely to get hold of many interviews as bizarre, trite and uncomfortable as the one I’ve just finished reading, with model Naomi Campbell interviewing cuddly dictator Hugo Chavez. No link unfortunately, so you’ll have to beg borrow or steal a copy of the mag to read it yourself. I’m late on the bandwagon with this one, it’s the interview everyone’s been talking about. What does a supermodel have to ask/say to one of the most notorious/loved politicians in the world? Very little of substance it turns out.

Bits of it are almost surreal, such as the following…

NC:Who is the most stylish world leader?
HC:Fidel of course! His uniform is impeccable, his boots are polished, his beard is elegant.
NC:Would you go topless like Vladimir Putin?
HC:Why not? Touch my muscles!
NC:Do you know the Spice Girls?
HC:I have memories of them. I know the Queen of England though.