I met up with Katie Spragg yesterday who was telling me about the Colour blog she and a couple of comrades are running in Wolverhampton. Colour is “a West Midlands-based promotions group, founded in 2006. Our focus is bringing leftfield folk, electronica, ‘indie’ and other mainstream-eschewing artists to the area through our live events and DJ sets.” The blog is supposed to complement that and, I feel, does it well. It’s not just focussed on Colour but illustrates what the people behind Colour are like, what they’re interested in, what makes them happy.
I got to know Katie through my work on Created in Birmingham and she became the Wolverhampton ambassador, making sure my Brum-centric brain wasn’t quite so insular. It helped that Light House, where she works, is a lovely place and something Birmingham should look to emulate and I often thought they should have some kind of blog complementing the communities that existed there. Around the same time Creative Wolverhampton appeared on my radar as a blog that was of a similar breed to Created in Birmingham.
The reason I mention both these blogs in the same post is I think Colour is the more useful one. Sure, Creative Wolverhampton (when it’s being updated regularly) is an essential resource for facts and information about the city’s creative activity, just as Created in Birmingham is, but Colour, while less comprehensive and less focussed on the region, is much more interesting on a human level and much more useful to the region.
For a start it’s not insular. It looks outside its geographical area and even its subject, such as this post on Dave Eggers’s TED talk. As I found with Created in Birmingham, when you’re trying to be comprehensive about a city it’s very difficult to keep tabs on what’s happening outside and this can be a bad thing. But if you’re not concerned with that then you can bring ideas and influences in which is beneficial for all.
Secondly it shows what people in Wolverhampton who are doing stuff are interested in. Sure, only three people but it all adds up and helps to expand any preconceptions folk might have about the city. If you’re interested in promoting an area as somewhere where good stuff and interesting people are then this sort of thing is invaluable.
Thirdly, it’s very ambient. While Matthew’s posts in particular are thoughtful and well crafted there doesn’t seem to be the sort of strict editorial line you’d expect from a magazine-style site like, say, Pitchfork. As I scroll through the posts the experience is warm and floaty, like mooching around someone’s flat looking at their stuff and chatting about things over cups of tea late into the night. This makes the blog very welcoming and, one imagines, reflects the attitude they have towards the Colour nights themselves.
Finally, I’d expect none of this is deliberate or calculated, and that’s what really makes it work. These a sense of authenticity to the voices here that is impossible to fake.
Blogging about cities is something I’ve been thinking about a lot these last couple of years and while city-specific blogs like Birmingham It’s Not Shit and Created in Birmingham are great and what they do they don’t really represent the essence of the city that well, not to mention being rather difficult to emulate. Blogs like Colour, that are anchored in a place but reach beyond it, do this much better as well as being much more manageable for those who are doing stuff other than just blogging.
I agree whole-heartedly with points 2-4 but I’m not sure the comparison in your first point works – Colour and CW share a format but are very different beasts.
In terms of usefulness, if I didn’t know Wolverhampton (and I don’t really) CW gives me information about all sorts of things that I can dip into. Colour tells me what the people who run one night there are into. Is that interesting? Yeah. Useful? On its own I’d say not – you’d need a spread of blogs of a similar ilk and together they would be useful.
Anyway, surely accusing CiB, CW, BiNS, etc of being insular is like accusing water of being wet – that’s their whole essence and there’s value in being geographically single-minded as you’ve proven yourself.
I should have emphasised, or even made, the point that it’s blogs like Colour in aggregate that make them more interesting that a single site like CiB. You need everyone who’s doing interesting stuff to run a blog or similar for it to work. And also the criteria of useful/interesting is important and not one I think can be settled on easily.
I think my big point is while CiB, etc are very important they’re not the best examples for others to be inspired by and they don’t, on the whole, reflect what the people of an area are like. It’s that personal, whimsical stuff that reflects the character of a city much better than info about stuff that’s going on (as vital as the latter is).