Category Archives: about me

Talking about Pink Floyd at Thinktank Planetarium

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Later this summer, I’ll be giving a series of newly-compiled talks about three Pink Floyd albums, at the Immersive Theatre in the UK’s first purpose-built digital Planetarium at Thinktank, in central Birmingham:

Each talk precedes the playing of the respective album (a 65 min edit in the case of The Wall) accompanied by Fulldome animated visuals across the full planetarium dome.

Doors open at 18:30 for a prompt start at 19:00. Tickets must be booked in advance. I hope to see you there.

More on my Pink Floyd-related work.

Update

The above talks are now sold out. I’ll be repeating them on the following dates:

My interview about Wikipedia, with BBC WM’s Carl Chinn

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I appeared on Carl Chinn‘s radio programme on BBC WM this morning, to discuss my eight years of editing Wikipedia.

Smiling man, wearing headphones, at microphone

During the interview, I took the above picture of Carl. Afterwards, I drove home, cropped the picture, uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons (the repository for open-licensed media, allied to Wikipedia) and used it to illustrate the Wikipedia article about Carl — all while he was still on air and thus able to tell his listeners about it near the end of the show.

The interview can be heard online.

I’ve done several radio interviews, about the web (including some with Carl, back in the 1990s), my books on Pink Floyd and about birdwatching and my role as a trustee of the West Midland Bird Club. I really like doing them.

Dan Slee, me, HyperLocal Govcamp West Midlands, BrewCamp, and cake

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Dan Slee is not only as good an example you’ll find of a local government officer embracing and exploiting social media, but also a fine friend. It’s always a pleasure to work (or socialise) with him, like when we jointly led a GovCamp session on using Flickr and Wikipedia in the public sector:

(photo shows, left-to-right, Neil Franklin, Dan, Ben Proctor (standing), Ken Eastwood, me, a bit of Peter Olding)

He has just blogged about the work he and I have done together, on HyperLocal Govcamp West Midlands and BrewCamp, along with Stuart Harrison, Mike Rawlins and Simon Whitehouse.

And lots of cake.

Alan Sugar, Digby Jones and me, in the Daily Express

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You’ll never see a nipple in the Daily Express according to .

But you can read about my new freelance career, thanks to reporter , whose article, “The Apprentice Proves that Britain Means Business“, is in both their on-line and paper editions, today. (You’ll notice that I’ve done the Daily Express the courtesy of linking to them, Like most mainstream newspaper sites, they don’t link to their subjects.)

Ros says of me:

This February it was revealed more than 4,000 Birmingham City Council jobs were being axed over the next three years to save £300million. Andy Mabbett was one of those who opted for voluntary redundancy after 21 years working for the local authority, the past 17 of them as a website manager.

At the age of 47 he’s setting up on his own as a consultant in online community building. “I had offers of work even before I left,” he said. “I’m lucky to have good contacts, good experience and saleable skills. Although there are cutbacks everywhere there are still things that need to be done and so there’s a market for people who can do them.”

I never thought I’d be mentioned in the same article as or . They must be chuffed.

Making a Difference to My Career

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As you may know, I left my job with Birmingham City Council (after 21 years!) at the end of April, and am now in the process of setting up as a freelance advisor on online communities and content. I’ll write more about that soon; it was my plan to take May off, to do some bird watching, relax, and plan my future activities — including trying to come up with snappier way to describe the services I’ll be offering!

However, I was delighted to be immediately approached by Vicky Sargent of Boilerhouse, and asked to be part of the ‘Making A Difference with Data‘ project, set up to spread understanding about open data and transparency in local public services.

My role will be to blog, and aggregate bookmarks, about good and bad practice in publishing and using open data in the roads and transport sector. (My MaDWD blog posts will be linked to, from the ‘My comments elsewhere’ section of this site; and will appear on .) I’ll also be involved in running an on-line conference in June.

I’m delighted to have found my first gig so quickly, and really looking forward to a task which focusses on a subject about which I feel passionately.

I’d be very interested to hear what you think are the issues affecting that subject; good examples you’ve come across, and relevant datasets which you’d like to see made available openly. Examples from overseas are especially welcome.

My name is Andy Mabbett, and I’m a Hyperlocal blogger

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Recently, I’ve been increasingly interested in the phenomenon of ‘hyperlocal’ blogging: blogs about a particular area or locality (or, in one of my favourite and rather extreme cases, a single square metre).

Some fantastic work has been done by my friends at Talk About Local, whose site will tell you all you could ever need to know about about hyperlocal blogs.

For a long time, I’ve been contributing to the debate about how hyperlocal blogs might evolve, for example organising events such as the Hyperlocal Govcamp West Midlands (aka ) unconference, the first such event to introduce hyperlocal bloggers to local government web folk and other public sector people. I’ve also attended others, like the excellent TAL11 in Cardiff. I’ve also taught hyperlocal bloggers to use WordPress and other tools, at Social Media Surgeries. My hyperlocal activity even pre-dates blogging — I was the instigator and founder of the Usenet discussion newsgroup uk.local.birmingham, in 1998.

Having talked the talk for so long, I’ve finally decided to walk the walk, and am now a contributor to my local blog, The B44 (B44 is the postcode for where I live, covering parts of the Great Barr and Kingstanding parts of north Birmingham).

My first post there is on the subject of . That and future posts will appear under the “My comment elsewhere” section of this blog.

I’m grateful to the site’s founder, , for the opportunity to participate.

Portrait with Brompton Bike

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I had my portrait (or rather, several) taken yesterday, by , aka , as part of his project to record the cyclists of Birmingham.

We got in touch on the useful Birmingham Cyclists website.

I posed with my beloved Brompton bike, under Lancaster Circus Flyover (52.48598,-1.892513) and by one of my favourite statues, Hebe (52.484438,-1.892175), by (1966).

Thanks to Pete for permission to reproduce the pictures, which are his copyright, all rights reserved.

An open letter to Facebook, about their broken microformats

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Dear Facebook,

Thank you for adding an hCard microformat to my profile on your site.

However, it’s broken, as you can see in this screenshot, made using the debugger in the superb ‘Operator’ add-on for Firefox:

Microformat contains bogus "org" and "title" properties and no ""URL" or "email" properties

My Facebook profile, with broken hCard microformat shown in Operator toolbar's debugger

You need to fix some things:

  • I am not an organisation, so please remove the org property (you may have some user accounts for organisations, contrary to your own polices. That’s their, and your, problem — individual users are by far the majority).
  • The names of six of my friends, chosen by you at random, are not my titles. My title is currently “Mr”. (I say currently; it might change to “The Right Honourable”, if ever gets to be PM and I threaten to publish the pictures).
  • Add class="url" and rel="me" to my web addresses, This is probably the single most useful thing you could do for me right now. Unless you like ironing.
  • Add class="email" to… oh, you guessed, To my e-mail address; that’s right. I’m sure that won’t be hard to do.
  • Add a machine readable date and mark up my birthday as such: I might get more cards if you do.
  • Mark up my address as such, or at least as a label.

If you do this for me, I promise not to refer to you as “Farcebook” again. Until the next time you screw up, that is.

All the best

Andy
— x —

Hello world!

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I’m migrating to a WordPress.org installation. Please bear with me — and the crappy header graphic — while I fiddle under the bonnet.

The links that used to be on my home page are now on the new about page. I’ve migrated posts and comments from my old blog, Mabblog, and closed comments there. I’ll be using this site to blog from now on.

Recommendations for a better theme, useful plug-ins and the like all welcome. I’d particularly like to be able to write my own HTML header and footer (without using PHP), and to add & improve metadata headers.