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 folk to communicate with are the people you share a street a suburb, a subdistrict, village a town a city with.

This has led to an addition to the web2 bingo lexicon ‘hyperlocal’.  A rash of hyperlocal platforms have sprung up in the UK and USA to aggregate local content and to encourage people to post simple content.  The technology and design is usually slick with nice rounded corners and clip art of attractive young people being down and with it on the site.  They invite you in to post your community events or write about life in Midfordshire.  But in general these hperlocal platforms have an ‘empty restaurant’ problem – you browse-in attracted by a nice menu and some marketing but there is no one there, so you move on swiftly.

This dearth of real content in the hyperlocal platforms comes from focussing on the technology, rather than the content and the people.  The money goes into building a national or multinational technology platforms, not into creating content.  Sites that are people-led and content-led such as the locally-organised Netmums, the excellent Created in  Birmingham or Steve Hatts SE1 show how to build local online content – focus on real community needs and get some people who understand the target community to run it and write it.

Many of the hyperlocal platforms or don’t quite answer the ‘what’s in it for me’ proposition for people wondering how to promote local causes or otherwise share their content from community sites.  I don’t want to send my content into a closed network, with few members that just eats it and gives my community site nothing back.

So how can hyperlocal sites work with kosher community sites in a two way relationship?.  I have had some interesting exchanges recently with Richard Pope, Simon Grice and Matt Collins  (Localmouth) who all have differnet takes on hyperlocal platforms. (Richard has set up a new register an interest page for people interested in his StreetWire proposition).  Here are my own emerging views on how such sites can best work with independent community led sites:

1 – take feeds in from real local sites.  Many hyperlocal sites are closed-ish platforms trying to attract ‘members’ to post.  To be truly useful for a local webservice such as kingscrossenvironment.com or a punter trying to get some airtime for their local issue a hyperlocal platform has to take feeds in.  This presumably poses a  liability problem for the hyperlocal platform but gets around the empty restaurant problem.  Matt has taken a feed in from KingsCrossEnvironment.com here.

2 – offer feeds out customisable to post/zip codes (as www.fixmystreet.com does) with population density radii (i.e. you get a feed for an area in which 50k people live no matter what the population density).  Then independent community sites can take your content and provide some visibility.  I would love to have a feed from Patient Opinion of comments on my local hospitals in my kings cross site. Make the feeds customisbale to content – so i can take a feed of say events in museums and art galleries but not in pubs.

3 – provide in and out widgets for community sites to have in their sidebars.  Both a widget of feeds out and an ‘add content’ widget to take stuff into your hyperlocal service.

4 – be totally open don’t restrict services to members or, if you feel you have to have a sign up service for your platform to target content by postcode, still allow the feeds as set out above.  Have a tradesman’s entrance to the walled garden for content to come in and out but send individual members of the public through the turnstiles.

All views welcome

$$$$$$$$$$$ 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 needs more web2 hyperlocal news platforms – blogger, typepad and wordpress will do just fine.  The web desperately needs more local content.  The only way to get that it to train some folk.  But if you fancy a punt read below and find more here.

‘We’re giving away around $5 million in 2009 for the development and distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs.

If you have a great idea that will improve local online news, deepen community engagement, bring Web 2.0 tools to local neighborhoods, develop publishing platforms and standards to support local conversations or innovate how we visualize, experience or interact with information, we’d like to see it! You have the opportunity to win funding for your project and support within a vibrant community of media, tech, and community-oriented people who want to improve the world.

There are three rules to follow to apply to the 2008-09 Knight News Challenge:

Use or create digital, open-source technology as the code base.

Serve the public interest.

Benefit one or more specific geographic communities.

Get support for your application before you submit: The brand-new News Challenge Garage is a coaching and mentoring site for prospective applicants to talk with mentors and peers, check out previous winners’ applications and improve your application before you submit.

Applications for the 2008-09 cycle will be taken starting September 2, 2008 and close on November 1, 2008.’

 

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 small communities and even large towns.   So good local websites, firmly about a place, frequently updated by volunteers stand out and often do well in Google.    The less well known a place is the more a good local community site can rise to the top of popular search engines and define the place online.  

A great example is the little village of Bishopthorpe (pop. 3,000) just south of York (map).  Kevin Harris linked to a marvellous community site there run by volunteers.  Bishopthorpe is a small village, and the site is only updated a few times a month.  But it is the only substantial online presence for the village and site rises effortlessly to the top of search engines.  And it plays a strong role in how Bishopthorpe is presented to the world.

Across the UK development agencies and councils spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on brochures and ad campaigns to raise awareness of their area or regeneration towns.  Ads featuring actors and actress strolling hand in hand through meadows strewn with poppies or heritage buildings often do little more than scream ‘Look we exist! And we aren’t as grim as you think’.  Once the campaign is over and the money spent you normally can’t find this promotional stuff on the web at all – the money is spent and gone in a puff.

Spending a tiny slice of that promotional money to train local volunteers, campaigners, activists, community organisers to self publish online would create a long lasting and vibrant impact on the web, visible around the world.  There are some great examples out there I’ve referred to before – Digbeth is Good, Saltaire, Brookmans Park, Parwich.  If you were an ad agency this sort of positive, genuine, grass roots voice endorsing your product would be gold dust.  

The positives far outweigh any disagreement with the authorities over say a planning campaign.  It’s far better to get a generally positive and occasionally critical voice out there than some of the things people will do if they only want to express their negative energies about a place.  Birmingham City Council has got the hang of this – the Digital Birmingham campaign funded Pete Ashton to run some community blogging workshops.  Would be good to see more of this as cities prepare for a post industrial digital future.

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, The Guardian/Scott Trust and the deep pocketed international Murdoch regime will emerge unscathed.

“We could face complete market failure in some areas of regional papers and some areas of commercial radio,”

This is bad but predictable news for local democracy in the UK – we need plural local news so that we know what our elected representatives are getting up to and to rally neighbourhoods in local campaigns.  The best way to combat this is to empower communities and neighbourhoods to publish themselves online in their own voice.  The sort of thing we see in Birmingham, Parwich and Kings Cross.

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 of its travel news.

‘Granted, this will save money. It’s also so short-sighted it’s beyond belief. By consolidating assorted operations, Global is slowly, bit-by-bit, taking away every last remnant of what makes local radio stations unique.

This is a real world example of the generic trend i wrote about here – commercial ‘local’ media can’t afford to remain local.  This is a threat to local voice and democratic expression.  Free or cheap modern digital media such wordpress driven by community organiser volunteers who anyway have a burning need to communicate seem the only hope for true local media.

Matt over at hyperlocal blogger has made an interesting post about what makes a good local blogger. He stresses the need for decent interesting content, rather than opinion. This chimes well with me – in kings cross we generally try to keep opinion to a minimum, except where big local campaigns are running. We don’t have editorial rules per se, rather we do it by feel. In a physicial community people are more interested in the facts and news than they are what you think about it. You need as well though a good broad human network on the ground both to feed you information and to spread the word about the site – this is vital and something bloggers often miss. A network of folk who never leave their screens isn’t much use.

It can be really hard to find local groups online even if you live in an area.  Most ultra or hyperlocal groups are below google’s radar.  Small groups in communities with distinctive names often show up but others get lost in the internet ocean.  Also many local community groups are online in closed email lists – which you can’t take part in unless you know they exist, which often doesn’t serve them or the community.

Richard Pope over at MySociety produced an easy to use but technically very smart site a while ago to help crack the problem.  Groupsnearyou.com makes it easy for a local online group to relate itself to an area on a google map by clicking and dragging a box.  The site then converts the map area into as many post code references as appropriate.  People can then find the group through a simple ‘type in yourpostcode’ box.  The model Richard uses is a dig in the ribs for the semantic web community.  Groupsnearyou gathered about 700 community groups without any marketing.  Like all MySociety sites it is altruistic and non commercial.

MySociety have now applied a game approach to try and build the list of sites and break into the huge repository of residents email groups on Yahoo:

‘There are nearly 30,000 yahoo groups containing the word ‘residents’ and over 15,000 with the word ‘neighbourhood’ in, but we’ve no idea what towns and cities they actually cover. That means loads of local knowledge locked away where no one can find it (boo). So we need your help to map them! (don’t worry google, you’re next). How it works

‘We show you the description of a random group. If you think it looks like a local email group (a residents’ association or a knitting club), you then have to guess what area you think it covers.

You can go direct to adding groups here.  It’s great fun, with a slight sense of prurience as you delve into community activity in Georgetown…

But in spotting a load of community groups last night I was struck by how disproportionately many were American and how few British.  This helps build a case for a stimulus to grassroots volunteers in the UK to get online by giving them the simple skills required.

This looks like a timely report from Demos – covered in the Guardian – giving young people the basic skills to self publish unlocks their democratic voice. The Guardian says of the report:

‘It also suggests that creating video blogs and online diaries should be part of the school curriculum, used by schools in the same way that they organise museum trips or extra art classes.’

This notion is at the heart of this discussion around ultra or hyperlocal voice – give people some very simple online publishing skills and communities can find the most effective voice they have ever had.  The Demos report ‘Video Republic’ by Celia Hannon and Charlie TImms is mainly about YouTube and other video publishing platforms.

“It’s now as normal for teenagers to write a blog as it is to write a diary – that’s a massive shift,” said Celia Hannon, a researcher with Demos and the lead author of the report.
“Youngsters are working out their relationship to the outside world and forging an identity.”
The report makes recommendations to help adults cope with the changing online environment, and calls particularly on schools to help youngsters understand the long-term implications of living their lives in a semi-public way.

“Schools, universities and businesses should prepare young people for an era where CVs may well be obsolete, enabling them to manage their online reputation,” says the report. “This generation of young people are guineapigs … we need an educational response that extends beyond the focus of safety, towards broader questions of privacy and intellectual property.”

‘As young people experiment with taking on powerful roles as reporters, distributors, commentators and artists, they are increasingly plotting their ‘route around’ existing political and cultural institutions. This poses a profound challenge to decision-makers, but it also creates opportunities. For European democracies starved of legitimacy, it could open up new channels for democratic expression and participation.’

Mashup* ran an interesting event last Friday on the ‘hyperlocal’ agenda.  I have been merrily using the term ultralocal when in fact hyperlocal has apparently been trademarked in the USA for local news beneath the radar of the conventional media.  There was a crowd of thirty or so software developers and investors interested in how to make money out of ultralocal or hyperlocal news.  As far as i could make out, there were only two or three hyperlocal content creators there – me, James Hatts from SE1 and the engaging Walid Al Saqqaf of TrustedPlaces.

I did a pitch on Kings Cross and disappointed many by suggesting that there was no way to monetise this sort of thing. If you are ultralocal or hyperlocal enough to be interesting to your community you are almost by definition serving an audience niche too small to be funded by advertising. Kevin Harris who animated  the event extremely well seems to concur.

There is a paradox for local news – it can’t support its industrial era costs in a world where interest in news is moving online.  But at the same time conventional local news isn’t interesting enough to people because it isn’t local enough.   So it faces a lose-lose situation – to cut costs (and still broadcast or print) it has to concentrate production at a regional level and so is less interesting to its audience.  Communities lose out as they lose an albeit imperfect voice.

With only a few exceptions, it is hard to see how solo ultralocal or hyperlocal sites can support a paid member of staff (at the very lowest £25k inc overheads).  So unless new sources of funding arise, a conventional paid for journalist model looks unlikely at an ultralocal level.  The only way to gather hyperlocal news for an industrial era news model is by tapping into a volunteer base to write news for you.  Which is what seems to be happening in Teeside according to Roy Greenslade.  Trinity Mirror seem to be attaching volnteer driven hyperlocal model to a traditional news cost model – which reminds you a bit of trad. bookshops attaching online businesses to their trad. model – it was entirely web-based competitors that prevailed.

For more on the Trinity Mirror plans for hyperlocal go to Sly Bailey’s recent speech here and scroll through to 11 minutes 30 seconds in.  Sly claims the hyperlocal sites have created five spin off print products.  She also describes geo-tagged news running in beta on the Liverpool Echo site.