In short - Pete gets or kinda doesn’t get an award, Popworld’s Miquita drops the N-word into her speech, Pete invades the stage and we perhaps wish we’d gone to SXSW a day early instead.

Congrats to Pete for his win at last night’s Guardian MEGA awards.

It was a proper ‘gala’ event, complete with champagne boat ride on the Thames from Embankment up to the 02 Arena (the rebranded Millennium Dome), where the event was happening. It was very well organised and there was a good vibe about it from quite early on. That said, we did feel a little bit out of place with our bags, Pete, Jo and I for our trip to SXSW.

Live micro-blogging with Twitter, Utterz and Twitxr

A few of us were Twittering the event from early on including one of Pete’s fellow nominees sitting next to me who as a soldier journalist (Vaughan Smith from the appropriately named From the Frontline) told me “I was twittering in Afghanistan”. He started the site as an indie news video outfit years ago “with a bunch of friends, half of whom are dead now”. That puts a whole new perspective on social media / publishing if reporters are Twittering under those conditions…

Also on the table were some other very interesting people including a guy from Firebox (a gadgets for guys site?), a young entrepreneur who runs UnderAge (live music for under 18s), the guys who did the Radiohead ‘how much do you want to pay?’ model and a woman who runs a start-up that offers the service of ‘any question answered by text message’ which sounds like it’s aimed at solving all those contentious pub conversations. Also bumped into Adam Gee from Channel 4 (who I think was involved in a couple of the winners’ projects) and Mark Borkowski who I had had a passing working connection with when we did Name in Lights last year, as well as meeting a few new people - particularly the people from Big Art Mob who seem to have a nice thing going on, and Martin who started Walkit.com and turns out to be another hide-his-light-under-a-bushel Birmingham resident. Nice chap, so I’m hoping he’ll maybe pop along to one of the Birmingham Bloggers Meetups or Multipack.

Apparently as we continued to twitter the event it proved amusing reading to a few people who were back in Birmingham following us. Andrew Dubber has posted a screengrab and commentary.

I also added in a few photos using instant photo-sharing site Twitxr, where basically I was taking photos on my iPhone, emailing them to a secret email address and having them appear on twitter for anyone following the event.

All going Nathan Barley

It was a decidedly Nathan Barley nearly-all-white left-of-center in-crowd event, complete with a ‘concept band’ straight out of Mighty Boosh (reminded me of “Future Sailors“), a couple of apparently unbriefed presenters, a string quartet ripping murderously through some well know pop songs and ultra-minimal ’starter as work of art’ meal.

A few people were getting restless on our table after a while - maybe it was going on too long? Certainly you don’t want to have a bunch of non-conforming bloggers hanging out together if you don’t want some dissent!

Does the Guardian think that using the N word is acceptable?

Things started going steeply downhill when one of the presenters (Miquita from Popworld) randomly dropped the N word into one of the award announcements without any reason or warning. I remember there was a big hoo-haa last year about a similar comment in Big Brother - I wonder if she’ll get any flack for it too. It certainly didn’t make me want to listen to the rest of her waffle and she was later booed when she made a half-hearted apology.

Oddly, I thought that Pete’s award was about to be announced at the time (I wasn’t following the programme) and was recording the moment using Utterz. It’s a service for making short recordings via a mobile phone by just ringing a phone number, with the resulting audio file being posted online in real-time. It’s a great service although the site is on the ugly/clunky side and I’m planning to put it to good use at SXSWi this year. You can just about hear what she said but the quality is very low.

Damp squib

So when it came to Pete’s award we were all ready to go up on stage and have a bit of a ‘yay isn’t this all a bit silly but great as well’ moment, we were all confused when the presenters basically said “And because it was all a bit apples and oranges we’ve decided not to give an award in this category but please give the finalists a round of applause” and then moved onto the next one.

As Pete said later they’d chosen the “nobody wins” route instead of what I would have thought would be a much nicer “we’re all winners here” route, and certainly everyone on our table was looking at eachother in a confused way. I nearly walked off but it would have been rude to the other people on the table. Ah well - who knows what the organisers’ reasons were… certainly in the fancy pants brochure they had produced all three finalists were billed as ‘winners’.

Bearing in mind that Jo and I were there as guests and had dropped £250 per person with the kind support of Birmingham City Council (who put in the seed money that started CiB in the first place) to be round the table, and missed a whole day of SXSW just to be there we felt pretty deflated. What could have been worse was that we were at one point considering booking a whole table out as a show of Birmingham creative talent by inviting a few others with us. Pretty glad we didn’t now because that would have just been embarassing.

Pete gets up on stage…
Of course the punchline to the night was Pete’s frustration getting the better of him and deciding to get up on stage anyway. But I’ll leave him to tell you about that in his own words. [update] Video here

The net result - Created in Birmingham is ‘joint winner’ of the MEGA Award for Best Independent Blog, according to the supplement going in the paper on Monday, so I guess that’s all that counts.

Well bloody done Pete.

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