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There’s some interesting new data about the ‘digital divide’ in the guise of the ‘Living Costs and Food Survey 2011′ which is published by the Office for National Statistics as ‘Family Spending‘, published annually. So here’s their headline statement regarding family spending on Internet access: “Differences by income were also evident for internet access, with [...]

Here’a a post about my experience of interacting with the ebook loan system in my local library. I do some reflection on the value or otherwise of such systems in a column published in the Birmingham Post newspaper. There I summarised the experience as: “After a fiddle and a couple of emails to the helpdesk, [...]

At my workplace, Birmingham City University, we had a very illuminating talk to students last week from John Denton who is Managing Editor, TV Platforms, BBC Future Media and Technology. He sometimes contributes to the BBC Internet blog. The talk is below and a lot of it was about the integration or otherwise of social [...]

During the summer the Business Cluster Opportunity Group that represents the Digital Media industry in the West Midlands asked me to produce a kind of positioning paper whilst the discussions were ongoing about the formation of Local Economic Partnerships (LEP). The group was formed in 2003 so the paper is kind of saying: ‘don’t dump [...]

I gave a presentation at the LUCID dissemination event today in which I proposed that the region needs to think afresh about setting a strategy for identifying opportunities in the digital economy. I know, sounds grand doesn’t it. The bottom line is that I have to write a short paper for Advantage West Midlands to [...]

Just thought I’d get this down as it’s an issue raised in the meeting I’m sitting in as I type this now: “Are the city’s creative industries too far on the other side of the social media curve that they’ve forgotten how to engage with everybody else?” The meeting is generally made up of representatives [...]

I did a presentation at one of Aston Science Park’s ‘Seminars for Success’ this week – I don’t do many 7.30am starts so that’s almost worth a post in itself. All I want to do here is say thanks to those that sent me positive feedback afterwards and a general hello to some new followers [...]

I’ll avoid cross-posting in future but my first posting at the Digital Birmingham blog is about a useful example of how social media can be used by small businesses: I’m always looking for examples of how social media can support small businesses. I’ve raised the question before using the local builder as an example. Why [...]