Recently by David Harte

Two things trouble me about social media. The first is that everyone I read or connect to via Twitter or Facebook or whatever, seems to be having a much more exciting life than me. It's a world of gallery openings, launches, great nights out or simply wonderful sunny, lazy days untroubled by personal dramas or upheavals.

Not that I'm jealous of course. Well actually of course it's because I'm jealous. I even get invited to some of the same events that my friends and colleagues go to I just never seem to get round to going to them - either through a lack of willing babysitters or, more likely, a general acceptance that I'm a long way from being renaissance man. A beer and night in front of the telly are usually all the cultural activity I can muster after a day at work.

Today was an at-desk day. Actually quite a lot of days are kinda that way but generally I've got something in the diary that gets me out the building for a bit. Today though I had a proposal I was supposed to start last week, but didn't, that had to be done by 5pm today, which it was. 

In between constructing paragraphs about why the Delphi method rocks in research terms I was struck by the unfolding drama in my RSS reader. In fact I now realise how differently I use the internet from 12 months ago when I would probably have completely missed the row over whether or not Surface Unsigned are screwing unsigned bands and acting like dunderheads over the use of Cease and Desist notices.

It was fascinating to watch the Birmingham blogging community come together to support what it still the city's key resource for knowing what's happening and who's who in the creative and cultural industries. I'd presumed that they were fighting some corporate numbskulls who go out of their way to track down the mildest of criticism.  So, delighted to be distracted from proposal writing, I used the power of Companies House to track down the mighty Surface Unsigned Ltd. 

The library here at Birmingham City University is a model of efficiency nowadays. It emails you on the day that your books are supposed to go back and then lets you renew them online when you realise that you haven't looked at said books since the day you got them out. So it is with The 1952 City of Birmingham Development Plan.

This is as dry a document as you could hope to find. I got it out last November as I was pondering what earlier incarnations of the Birmingham Big City Plan had looked like. Given that the inner ring road is now widely recognised as a mistake, where's the document that outlines why it was needed in the first place. How clearly was the case made for it, how emotive was the language used? But since late last year there seems to have been little public discussion of the new plan as Stef Lewandowski has noted on this site. No wonder I'd let it drift.

But I've done the reading on this now and despite the rather plain, austere layout (this was 1952 after all - at the end of the Age of Austerity) the 1952 plan is by far the more exciting document. In fact it has what the new charter document lacks, it has tangible facts to get stuck into and major post-war problems to deal with. If you like, the new one's all theory where the 1952 plan is all practice.

I wrote an entry on my own blog last week that's been niggling away at me ever since. Catching up on the many pictures of the train derailment in Digbeth in March I mused over how the hole in the wall created by the goods wagon would be the right place for an entrance to a Custard Factory train station. I was writing with tongue slightly in cheek, particularly when pointing out how that same train line may one day have a direct connection to the boho enclaves of Moseley and Kings Heath.

However, it does make some sense and there is precedent here as the Jewellery Quarter station has only been there since 1995 and was built not on the site of a previous disused station but was created specifically to serve that creative quarter. The same could happen at Custard Factory. Imagine a direct connection from CF to JQ - a truly well connected, joined up Brum. It might even open up the Custard Factory to more visitors and before long we'd have more than two cafés and the newspaper shop would open before 9am and have some ice-creams in its freezer. In essence we might get what we don't want (and it's a leap but bear with me) - a long slow slide towards gentrification.

Now when I was a lad it was the done thing when it came to fundraising to hawk your sponsorship form round the neighbours in the hope of getting them to commit to a measly 10p a length for the 20 lengths your school was forcing you to swim to support their local charity (for us King Edward's Aston Boys it was the Children's Hospital). Even then all you'd get was a commitment rather than cash. You'd have to do a second trip up and down the street with wet hair and a towel round your waist to prove you'd actually done it before any money was handed over.

My how things have changed. I've just had a rather intense week of trying to use social media to raise funds and by and large succeeding. Inevitably this story involves blogging and tweeting and people I don't know very well being incredibly generous....

There are 120,700 businesses in the UK's Creative Industries and the largest 200 of them account for half the total turnover. In Television and Radio the largest four firms make up a whopping 64% of the turnover and there's a similar figure for the publishing industry (four firms contributing 58% turnover). Should these figures worry us? How many of these big hitters have we got in Birmingham and should we be pumping our resources into getting more of them?

Of course the key point is that like much of the rest of the country our Creative Economy sits in the long tail. If the top 200 are making 50% of the turnover that doesn't mean the remaining 120,500 are unimportant; in fact they're crucial. In some sectors the balance is such that the 'tail' makes up the bulk of the growth. Take the music industry. There you have the top four firms contributing just 4% to turnover and as a whole small firms contributed 69% to the sector. The figures are similar in Film and Photography.

As someone who leads a regional project aimed at developing the region's media and music sectors I get to read a lot of reports and government strategies about the Creative Industries.

Reading them is never the most exciting of jobs but making sense of them can be even trickier to say the least. Given that the government, regional development agencies and a whole host of other bodies love to talk about the Creative Industries there'll be plenty to make sense of and I'll be using this space to do just that.

The Government estimates that the UK's Creative Industries are the same in scope and scale as the financial sector (about 7.3% of the economy with two million employees). Impressive.

The trouble is that when it comes to this sector the figures seem to change all the time. A recent report reckons we've been doing the counting wrong and that the figure is slightly higher but with more creative workers in 'non-creative' companies than in creative ones.

Another problem is that not all ways of counting include the 28% of freelancers who work in the sector.