In the old days (about 1995) we used to say that the web meant ‘the death of distance’, the joy of the interweb was that you could communicate to the world for free, breaking the tyranny of the PTOs. Now things have come full circle economically and socially and people realise that the most interesting [...]
Archive for October 17, 2008
$5million for neighbourhoods online….apparently
$$$$$$$$$$$ The Knight Foundation in the USA is offering a big pile of cash in grants for neighbourhood innovation online in their newschallenge competition. Thanks to the generous Kevin Harris for the link. It appears that this grant scheme is focused on the technology, rather than the content. I am not sure that the web really [...]
How to define a place – train local people to help you do it with simple community websites and blogs
The internet is the first port for new information these days – ask any encyclopedia salesman. The internet can define how places appear to the world. For cities Google turns up loads of web pages – many of them commerical. But in the UK search engines turn up very little content by local people for [...]
'Carnage' in traditional media – bad news for pluralism, an opportunity for local volunteer publishing
The Guardian’s media guru Emily Bell has predicted five years of carnage in the UK media as the economic downturn bites. Her lecture at Polis has set the media jelly quivering. Of particular interest is her forecast that companies that have to return profit to UK shareholders wil sufer the most – only the BBC, [...]
Local radio becomes a lot less local
Good post from Gary Andrews on the latest developments in commercial local radio – reduction in news and another step in the withdrawal from genuine local production and new gathering. ‘Chief among these are the scrapping of local news bulletins between 11am and 3pm, to be replaced with a national news bulletin, and the outsourcing [...]