Results tagged “bbc” from Birmingham Post - Business Blog

Yesterday I was interviewed by BBC Midlands Today about the state of the region's economy.

These things are always tricky to gauge. You may be interviewed for ten minutes, but you know that only a few seconds of what you said will get into the report.

I was trying to strike a balance: I didn't want to come across as the next Alistair Darling and be talking the region into recession, but I also didn't want to be overly positive and come across as naive.

I'm not sure the end result achieved that objective, what do you think:

The golden rule for those at the top of the quangocracy that rules so much of our lives is that the more you are paid the less you are expected to spend your own money - on anything.

We learned last week that the chairman of the governors of the BBC, Sir Michael Lyons, is putting his subscription to Sky on his taxpayer-funded expenses. It cost us £459, including installation fees, to enable the former chief executive of Birmingham City Council to put his feet up at home and find what the opposition is doing. He doesn't have to fork out for a television set or a DVD recorder. According to the BBC's accounts, they're "lent" to him.

Before I begin, I apologise for my inexcusable absence, a combination of too many ideas, not enough time and IT incompetence on my part. However, hopefully I will have learnt from the experience...unlikely!

China, China, China. I have never been and would like to, it seems a lovely place, or at the very least interesting after the latest report on pollution in Beijing.

With the Olympics, they suddenly seem to have become the country to be talked about. Whether it is pollution, human rights, sports, foreign investment, China is the country we want to talk about.

Or do we? Well you answer that question for me...but here are a few of my musings on the subject.

Specifically, one: do we have the right to lecture the Chinese on pollution?

So, another week's gone by and inevitably every other sentence I hear is still carrying the words 'social networking'. Working in digital media it's pretty easy to guage when a bubbling web trend has gone mainstream - it's the point at which clients start asking us if there could be a commercial application for it. The inevitable question being, 'we've heard about this and would like to use it somehow?'. Now, this isn't a criticism of companies looking to be innovative, after all that's what keeps us in business. It is however a pretty good signpost that often the approach with tapping in to these services is born more from a 'lets have a presence' approach, rather than a 'do we have anything relevant to say that would justify a presence' approach. It's on this point then that I watched a few key 'link ups' unfold this week which paired some pretty well known names with some equally well known social media networks. The thing that made these stand out for me though was the fact that rather than being cynical attempts to create revenue streams, boost a brand or generally exploit an existing service, they all represented pretty neat ideas...