With Rachel Sterne of Ground Report I co-chaired a meeting of folk interested in hyperlocal media in the UK.  The meeting was at the Department of Culture Media and Sport at the request of Sion Simon MP the UK Culture Minister in advance of the digital britain bill.  I shall post more on the discussion when i have had time to reflect. But to make the meeting as transparent as possible here is some of the core information.

The meeting had the Twitter hashtag #cabinet and there is a Tweetdoc.  The group was informed by Rachel Sterne’s slides dissecting the hyperlocal market and Douglas McCabe’s statistics from Enders.  Three good posts have already emerged; from Hannah Waldram at Podnosh including attendees and two from Paul Bradshaw

At the end of the session the participants stuck post its on a boards with suggestions for what the government should and shouldn’t do in this sector.  Here are those post its in the raw, as transcribed by DCMS staff and grouped into themes (some came from tweets).  The post its were un-attributed.

Things Government could / should do

Legal
From @ journotutor: Sort out libel laws, stop wasting money on writing national occupational standards and develop digital literacy.
Reform libel laws.
Water down/remove draconian libel laws.
Clarify legal responsibilities and liabilities of publishers of user-generated content.
Immunity for defamation arising from comments.

Funding
Open arts funding to journalism.
PAY ME.
Can we have a UK Knight Foundation to promote enterprise?
Run competition X Prize to innovate.
Increase size of community radio fund and open it up to all community media.
Subsidise local public service reporting for use by anyone (or tax breaks).

Access
Free Wi-fi in cities – please!
Broadband for all.
Get MORE people online.
If you get people online – they will figure out the rest.
Let the market determine localities and interests. The Govt needs to be transparent. Not a nanny.

Training/attitudes
Incentivise employers (subsidies, grants etc.) to train staff in citizen journalism technologies.
Work in schools as a valid local platform for area-wide learning and citizen journalism.
Support grass-roots digital training for active citizens.
Train citizens to be leaders not writers.
From @ dilyan-damyanov: Promote a culture where bloggers are treated with the same respect as journalists.
Treat hyper local authors, publishers, bloggers the same as traditional media.

BBC
Defend BBC and notion of public service (as opposed to market funded) information.
Open up BBC and other public service skills and support resources in e.g. journalism and law to 3rd parties.
Prevent BBC from launching more localised sites.
Require BBC to make video news content available to grass roots publishers and not just legacy players.
BBC create innovations fund.
Prompt the BBC to provide its technology for distributed media/journalism.

Local Authorities
Prevent councils from distorting publishing market by running ad-funded propaganda newspapers.
Get councils to publish data (in an open format).
Develop guidelines for councils so they realise they should treat local bloggers as they would the local press.
Provide clearer guidelines for council publications e.g. should they have a ‘property’ section like Huf News does.
Make sure local authorities treat hyperlocal reporters the same way (?) they would traditional media – easy access to councillors / police etc.
Require councils to audio / video stream meetings and provide on-demand archive.

Access to data
Free all the data intelligently, faster and better. The more I think about it, the more I think this is the nearest there is to a single key.
From @johnbradford
Make information free by default (rather than FOI by request) and then keep out of the way and let hyperlocal blogs and twitter deliver.
Put out geocoded data easy to use.
Free up data and FOI.
Fund Geo-location tools / standards for info.
Release postcodes and other geo-data to encourage innovation.
Require all Govt / Public information to be published web first.
Set standards for publicly funded information.
Broaden FOI to include anyone spending public £.
When you free our data, combine it with an engagement plan that provides support to those that want to use it.

Other Ideas
Encourage ultra small scale experimentation with low overheads and low cost of failure.
Use open hyperlocal approach to enhance Total Place agenda and pilot different models.
Have a clear vision and strategy for democratic renewal / reform, which guides their investment.
Monitor and evaluate civic impact of citizen journalism – net benefit or harm to civil society.
Act as a catalyst to encourage openness to dialogue with neighbourhood/hyperlocal sites.
Consider and publish impact assessments of major interventions eg newspapers.
Add journalism as act of supported volunteering.

WHAT GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT DO

Funding
Fund IFNCs. They will duplicate the BBC and distort the market.
Invest in new structures without consideration of their sustainability and legacy.
Fund unsustainable local publishing initiatives which don’t have ongoing (+multiple) funding sources.
Drag out the death cry of publishers through subsidy.
Bail out failing publishers or support traditional business models.
Bail out Channel 3 local/regional services.
Spend time/money on platforms.
Build a platform for news.

Councils
Stop council papers.
Don’t stop councils publishing.
Don’t stop councils publishing magazines, but set parameters to avoid undermining independent publishers (eg carrying ads).

Exclusion
Exclude people. Have multiple engagement platforms online and offline.
Forget that 15m are not online and that traditional media still has a role to play for many citizens.

BBC
Decimate the BBC. Yes it’s not perfect and could do more, but if we over slice and dice we may be worse – not better off.
Introduce expensive top-down solutions and one- size-fits all platforms.

Other don’ts
Make their own apps for opening government data.
Use Government defined boundaries/identities to determine provision of tools and resources – should enable self-definition of need/ [illegible]?
Assume information holes to plug are traditional media shaped.
Let big organisations have too much influence – they’ll stifle.
Define journalism by platform.
Be a nanny!

[ends]

Copy it into a new map

This is really useful if someone has created a Google map and you want to use the points without adding them all manually, or you want to add more content while using an original map as a template.

GMaps Tips has the original guide: I’ve tried this in Internet Explorer and Firefox and it didn’t work, but it did work in Chrome.

When in your map, look for the link ‘View in Google Earth’. If you can see that, you can right-click the link and copy it. Then Click: My Maps > Start a new map > Edit > Import > Add by URL, then paste in the URL you just copied. 

View other information alongside your map

So you’ve created a map of meeting places that your group likes to use. While you are viewing that map you’ll see that you can also search for other things on the map. Try it by entering ‘Schools’. You’ll see that a little pane appears in the bottom left corner and as you run more searches, you can choose whether to show or hide the search results. 

In this example, I searched for libraries, which show alongside the points I created. 

Maps are really useful on hyperlocal sites. 

There are a number of tools to create your own map. Google’s My Maps is an easy one to start with and you can easily link to it, embed it and invite other people to collaborate with you.

Read Google’s introduction to My Maps here. You’ll need to sign up for a Google account to use this service. As well as creating public maps to display on your site, you can create private maps to collaborate between a group, handy for agreeing who will cover which patch in a leaflet drop, for example. 

The thing about websites in local areas is that they’re often not very well linked to one another. I found in Stoke that I would struggle to find websites I’d seen on a shop sign unless I remembered the exact address, because Google wasn’t aware of their existence (see How to get the top of Google). This annoyed me, because I have replaced by memory with Google. 

Social Stoke was started to combat this problem and it has two sections: a straightforward blog and a delicious map. The blog looks nicer than a delicious page and means I can add pictures and longer articles, but mainly it is just an aggregate of delicious feeds.

The tag cloud is more useful. As it builds, it creates handy lists of different subjects. For example, here are our local pottery firms and here are some museums. As noted elsewhere, the lists can automatically become RSS feeds for embedding into other sites or tracking on a feed reader. 

The easiest way to open this up to collaboration – and it’s great to do this because if you don’t have a passion for fishing clubs, you can be sure someone in your local area does – is by asking people to create their own delicious account and start tagging, including ‘for:socialstoke’ (or whatever your username is). This means you can keep the tags consistent while still sharing the workload. 

It doesn’t take very long to make a really useful tag cloud and it makes those Saturday nights watching the X-Factor with your laptop on feel so much more productive!

This is a talk about local guide compiled by Nicky Getgood using Chris Unitt’s My standard changes to a free Wordpress.com blog.

Standard changes to make to a free Wordpress blog

The following are just a few steps someone with a new Wordpress.com blog might want to make to their site.

A couple of notes first:

• There’s no single ‘right way’ to set up a blog.  If you want to do things differently then great, go ahead.
• This is for the free Wordpress.com, not the self-hosted version of Wordpress
• We’ve assumed that you’ve already signed up to Wordpress and created a blog.  If you haven’t the talk about local guide on how to Create a simple website with Wordpress.com may be of help.

List of possible changes

These are the changes someone with a new Wordpress.com site might want to make:

• About page – update the content and disallow comments and pings on this page
• Delete the ‘Hello World’ post
• Links – delete Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org in the Blogroll and add a some of your own
• Change the blog tagline
• Add Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg and Reddit icons to posts
• Free up comment publication
• Disable Mshots
• Hide ‘related links’
• Update profile details
• Add some sidebar widgets

Making the changes

Here’s how to make the changes to your site via the Wordpress dashboard.

Updating Profile Details

• Select Users on the left-hand menu.
• Click Your Profile (just below Authors & Users).
• Go to the Name section underneath Personal Options.  Insert your First Name and Last Name (unless you want to be anonymous) and a nickname.  Choose what you want your name to be displayed as (at the bottom of posts and in comments) from the drop down menu.
• Click on Update Profile at the bottom of the page.

Settings

• Go to Settings – the bottom option on the left-hand menu.
• In General – delete the existing tagline that says ‘Just another Wordpress blog’ and replace it with something more suitable for your site such as ‘Newport news and events’, or just leave it blank.
• In Reading – Ensure the Comment count box is ticked. 
• You can also tick the boxes to add Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg and Reddit icons to posts.  This will make it easier for readers who use these social bookmarking services to bookmark and share your posts.
• Remember to click Save Changes at the bottom of each page where you alter settings.

Appearance

Themes and widgets are really a matter of personal preference, although it can be a good idea to remove Snap Shots (the link previews that pop up when you hover a cursor over some anchor text) and ‘related posts’ (the rarely relevant list of posts on other wordpress.com blogs). Both can be irritating for readers.

• Themes – if you want to change the theme of your blog and customise it, the talk about local guide How to change the appearance of your Wordpress blog may help.
• Widgets – these will be dictated by personal preference and the particular aims of your blog.  To alter the Widgets go to the Widgets option under Appearance in the left-hand menu of your dashboard
• You can add widgets and change the order by dragging the displayed boxes and placing them in your preferred position.  A good basic layout is (from top to bottom) Pages, Text (with a brief explanation of what the blog is about), Recent Comments (apparently placing this high up encourages commenting), Categories, Links and Search. 
• Go the Extras options underneath Appearance.  Untick ‘Enable Mshots on this blog’ if you do not want these to appear.   Tick ‘Hide related posts on this blog’ to remove these.

Manage Posts, Pages and Links

• Go to the Posts menu option – Put your cursor over ‘Hello World’ post in the list that appears and click delete on the options that appear under the blog post title.  This will delete the Hello World! post.
• Go to the Pages menu option – click on About and change the text to something more relevant. Also scroll down to the Discussion box underneath the blog post body text box.  Untick Allow Comments and Allow Pings if you want to disallow them both on the page.
• You can also add any extra static pages that are needed by selecting Add New underneath the Pages menu option.  If you’re unsure about the difference between a page and a post, read the talk about local guide What’s the difference between a page and a post.
• Go to the Links menu option.  Put your cursor over the two existing links to Wordpress websites and click delete on the options that appear beneath them.  Then click on Add New underneath Links and insert links of your own, such as a local community, venue or council website.

This is a talk about local guide compiled by Nicky Getgood using Nick Booth’s Tips for sharing videos with YouTube.

What is YouTube?

YouTube is the biggest and best know video-sharing website in the world. It enables you to upload and share videos of up to 10 minutes length.

How do I get started?

Create a free YouTube account by going to ‘Sign Up‘

• Help with signing up
• Video: Help I’ve forgotten my username or password

How do I record videos?

Videos can be filmed on most digital cameras, a camcorder, webcam or easiest of all using a Flip video camera or similar. Usually you need to download the file to your computer before uploading it to YouTube, but you can upload or email videos directly to YouTube from some phones. Uploading video usually takes longer than downloading (especially if you are using a normal ADSL broadband connection). The video needs to be right format (QuickTime .MOV, Windows .AVI, or .MPG files – any new camera will make these) It will also take a while once you have uploaded video to YouTube for it to be processed, usually only a few minutes though.

How do I upload videos?

Transfer the video to your computer (either onto the desktop or My Videos on a PC) – once you’re logged into YouTube click on the the yellow ‘Upload’ button in the top right hand corner. Select ‘Upload video and find the video file you want to upload. You’ll need to give it a title, description and category and then wait while it uploads.

• Video: Uploading videos to YouTube
• Uploading videos help

What is tagging?

Tags are really useful because they help you and anyone else searching for videos to find out more about each one. Good tagging makes your videos more findable which can lead to new users on YouTube, perhaps people working in your area or other people interested in your work.

You can also use tags to gather together lots of people’s videos from an event for example by creating a unique tag (eg rebootbritain) and link to it.

It also means videos can be aggregated outside of YouTube http://addictomatic.com/topic/rebootbritain on other websites

Things you can do with YouTube

• Record an event and embed the video in a blog post about it
• Capture peoples, ideas, thoughts and opinions (’voxpops’) with short interviews
• Find other users doing similar work (by searching for relevant tags or locations) and subscribe to their videos so that when they upload new ones, you are notified

How do I embed a YouTube video onto my website?

You will probably want to put yours and other people’s videos onto your website, often by placing it within a blog post.  This is very easy to do.

• Embedding video is really easy on most platforms and is a great way of adding movement and life to your site. Youtube videos have two links next to them, a URL and embed code.
• Copy the URL code
• In the Wordpress visual editor, find the little icon above the toolbar alongside Upload/Insert that looks like a film strip. Paste your copied URL from the Youtube video into the box that appears.
• If you are not using Wordpress, you can insert the video by copying the Embed code from YouTube and pasting it into the HTML editor of your blog.

More Info

For more information on what you can do with YouTube, including how to tailor your YouTube channel and create playlists, read Nick Booth’s Tips for sharing videos with YouTube.

The talk about local team are busy getting well underway with the West Midlands pilot of the project, and as part of that we’re holding a couple of social media surgery style sessions over the next couple of weeks, to help people from local communities and groups set up and develop effective community websites.

The first is this Wednesday 14th October in Burton-upon-Trent at Trent & Dove Housing’s offices, 10.00am-1.00pm.  The session has been arranged via Community Action & Support – East Staffordshire (CASES). 

The second is a lot closer to home at Stanhope Hall, Ketley Croft, Highgate, Birmingham B12 (map here) next Monday 19th October at 10.00am-12.00pm.  With talk about local land being just ten minutes away in Digbeth, we were keen to do something in Highgate and Sandra and Lee at Friction Arts were kind enough to put us in touch with the community centre’s womens’ group, who are enthusiastic about creating an online voice for the area.  They are open to others’ input so come along if you’d like to contribute! 

Both sessions are open and completely free, so if you’re nearby and would like to learn how to set up a community website, or perhaps need help with a site you already have, please come along and meet the talk about local team.

This is a talk about local guide compiled by Nicky Getgood using Nick Booth’s Tips for sharing pictures with Flickr.

What is Flickr?

Flickr is a photo-sharing website. You can upload photos (and short videos up to 90 seconds long), organise and share them with other people. When you upload a photo, it has its own unique website address so you can link to individual photos or group them together in sets. You can also embed them in other other websites and blogs. 

Flickr is very useful for community website managers as it provides an online space to host your images, so you do not have to upload all your images onto your website and use up the server space you have.  It is also good for sourcing images of your local area to use on your site, just remember to always attribute the photographer and link the image back to the Flickr image page.

How do I get started?

1. Create a free Flickr account (Yahoo own Flickr, so you can use an existing Yahoo account or create a new one)
2. Click on ‘Upload photos & videos’ and then ‘Choose photos and videos’. You can pick more than one. Once the list opf pictures you want to upload appears in the box then click the Upload button
3. Click ‘add a description’ you will see a list of all the photos you have just uploaded
4. You can tag all your photos at once by typing in tags (eg animal, building) and clicking add
5. You can also add them to a set – which helps group them together and means you can give a single link out to a set of photos
6. You can give a title and descprition to all your photos. This gives the photos more information and helps to describe what is going on, making them more findable
7. Scroll down and click save – you’ll now be on your photostream page. You can copy and paste this link to anyone and they will always see your latest photos. If you made a set, click on the thumbnail on the right hand side. You can give this link out to anyone that wants to see all the pictures in that set, even if you add some more later. If you click on the slideshow icon Flickr has automatically created a slideshow of that set, so you can sent that link out too.
8. Click on any of your pictures and then click ‘All sizes’ you’ll see a huge version of the picture. Click on ‘Small’ and there is some code that you can paste into another website to display your photo
9. When you embed a picture on Flickr (whether it is yours or someone elses under a Creative Commons licence) you should link to the picture on Flickr to encourage blog readers to explore your photos and perhaps leave a comment there

• Video: Your Flickr homepage

How do I organise my pictures?

Your Photostream always shows a list of your photos with the most recent ones at the top but you can also organise your photos by putting them into sets (like albums, eg. Launch Event or Holiday 2009) or you can give photos tags (or keywords eg. sport, architecture, birmingham).

How does tagging work?

Tags are really useful because they help you and anyone else searching for photos find out more about the photo. Really good tagging makes your photos more findable which can lead to new contacts on Flickr, perhaps people working in your area or other people interested in your work.

You can also use tags to gather together lots of people’s pictures from an event for example by creating a unique tag (eg tal09) and link to it http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/tal09

You can also embed it as a slideshow onto your website:

View the Flickr slideshow

$(‘#flickr_tal09′).flash(
{
src: “http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649″,
width: 400,
height: 300,
flashvars: {
page_show_url: ‘/search/show/?q=tal09&m=tags’,
page_show_back_url: ‘/search/show/?q=tal09&m=tags’,
api_media: ‘all’,
api_tag_mode: ‘bool’,
api_sort: ‘date-posted-desc’,
start_index: ‘0′,
lang: ‘en-us’,
api_tags: ‘tal09′,
api_params_str: ”,
offsite: ‘true’,
method: ‘flickr.photos.search’,
jump_to: ”
}
}
);
$(‘#flickr_tal09 span’).hide()

How do I insert an image on Flickr into my website?

Flickr does some useful things like automatically making small versions (thumbnails), medium-sized and larger versions of your photos, which you can then put on your website or insert into a blog post.

1. To insert a single Flickr image onto your website go to the Flickr image page, and click on ‘all sizes’ just above the image.
2. Choose the size of the image you want to appear.  Medium is usually the best size for a blog post picture.
3. Copy the image location of the resized image, which can be done by right clicking over the image in most browsers.
4. Ensure the In the ‘add an image’ option of the toolbar above your website’s New Blog Post text box, paste the image location into the space beside Image URL and press Insert.    

Using Flickr for more

At it simplest, Flickr can be used as an online photo library for individual or group but it is much more powerful as a way of making new connections with people on and offline.  To learn more about how you can connect with members of the Flickr community, read Nick Booth’s Tips for sharing pictures with Flickr.

Embedding video is really easy on most platforms and is a great way of adding movement and life to your site. Youtube videos have two links next to them, a URL and embed code.

If you want to upload video, using Youtube is much easier than finding your own host and it will automatically be available to Youtube’s audience on millions.

On Wordpress, find the little icon on the top of your site that looks like a film strip. Paste your copied URL from the Youtube video into the box that appears. 

That’s it!

Although Google’s mysterious algorhythms have become more complicated over the years to thwart a whole industry known as Search Engine Optimisation, Google ranking is still broadly based on simple principles: the more people like your site, the more they will link to you and that’s what makes Google think you’re good. If someone is searchin for something and its on your aforementioned good site, you’ll tank highly.

This means that it is in your favour to be sociable with other websites. Link to other websites that you think will be of interest to your audience and include lots of links within your own posts, both externally and internally. Politely ask the owners of sites that you are friendly with to add a link to your site, if it is relevant. The more Google’s spiders see that your site is lively, interactive, full of content and regularly updated, the more likely they are to promote it.

Because many places in Britain don’t have a lot of content about them online yet, you’ll probably find it doesn’t take very long for your profile on Google to appear on the front page, but you should not expect it to happen straight away. If you’re interested in what people are searching for to find you, keep an eye on the website statistics that are automatically present in a Wordpress site.