Collecting street stories at Highgate Funday

I’m glad the forecast is for sun tomorrow, because I’ll be spending the day in my local park at a Highgate Funday organised by Friction Arts.  I’ll be sitting in the Heritage & Place corner of the ‘Arts Zone’, playing with a little bit of an idea I’ve been wanting to do something with for a while.

In March I was pretty inspired by My Street – Cuban Stories, a beautiful book from artists Diana Ivanova and Babak Salari, who worked in Cuba to help people tell the stories of their street to someone who’s never been there with words and photography. At the launch event Babak commented how much more mobile we are than most Cubans, moving quite often rather than spending our lives in the same areas, using me as an example:

“When I was talking to Nicky, I couldn’t really work out where she was from . [He'd gotten the Irish father/English mother/Welsh childhood/Midlands adulthood backstory.] But when I asked her what street she’s from, then I knew.”

And he was right – I’m from Vanfield Close in Caerphilly, where I spent a large part of my childhood.  It’s not where I first lived and I’ve moved quite a lot since living there, but it’s the place that holds the most memories for me.  Of course, this may change in the future.

Since then I’ve been enjoying seeing people use Google Street View to revisit ‘their street’ and talk about the memories they hold.   So tomorrow I’ll be at Highgate Funday, talking to people about what they feel is ‘their street’, possibly revisiting those places on Google Street View and recording the stories they have to tell about them.  I’m hoping to create a simple map from these recorded conversations.  Whether it will work well or not remains to be seen – wish me luck!

Content idea from Bournville Village: News from the notice boards

Bournville Village Notice Board

News from the notice boards is a great new regular feature that Dave Harte has introduced on the Bournville Village website:

One of the best ways to find out what’s happening in and around Bournville is to take time to read the notice boards on the Village Green. We’ll be making this a regular category on the website. Here’s some upcoming events and courses we’ve learned about…

Are there communal noticeboards in your area where people tend to put up posters about local events, courses and lost cats?  Think about posting updates from the information on them as a regular feature on your community website.

The Wilderness Downtown

The Wilderness Downtown is a wonderfully creative use of film by Chris Milk that uses Google street view to make it brilliantly personal.  Simply key in your home address into the search bar, sit back and watch the overalapped film that appears of a young hooded boy running through your street. Enjoy!

Twitter & OAuth

More and more of us are using Twitter to communicate or to promote our hyperlocal sites. Until recently (yesterday!) you had to authorise the different applications you use to automagically tweet out about your latest posts with your username & password.

This as I’m sure you are all aware posed some security risks, we have all had random Direct Messages from your friends in the past asking you to rate who is the hottest out of …… or do you prefer Coke or Pepsi etc. Most of these are at best, a waste of time and at worst phishing for your password.

As of last night, you should not need to enter your username or password to use any application that works with Twitter.  Twitter have made changes to their authentication service that means you can authorise applications without having to enter these. I won’t bore you with the details you can read them here on the Twitter blog : Twitter Applications and OAuth

Now that Twitter has made these changes maybe it is time to have a look at what applications you have authorised on your account and have a bit of a tidy up?

When you are logged in to Twitter go to http://twitter.com/settings/connections and have a look at the authorised applications like in the screen grab below.

Can you remember what each application is for?

Remove any applications you don’t need or can’t remember what they are for (you can always re authorise them later). Then check the ones you do need and look at revoking them and authorising them again to make sure they are using the new authentication system.

Maybe you could change your password(s) as well just to make sure?

Changing your password is not as daft as it sounds, changing your password will highlight any applications that are still using the basic auth method, any that are using OAuth will continue working quite happily.

New statistics shows increased connection – and disconnection

The latest ONS internet statistics, posted by Race Online on Friday, give an update on the rapid growth of internet access in the UK, with a few points of interest for hyperlocal bloggers.

The headline is that 1.2 million people accessed the internet for the first time since August last year. 77 per cent of the population had accessed the internet in the three months before the survey and 60 per cent use the internet every day. As you would expect, web access decreases with age, but even so over 30 per cent of over-65s are online every day.

Young people are leading the way in mobile phone web access but it is the most common way to access the web wirelessly for all groups – making it worthwhile to check your website looks OK on a mobile web browser. This is especially useful if people are going to look up your website after seeing a poster out and about; don’t irritate them by giving them something flashing that sprawls all over the place. In a WordPress blog, you can go to Appearance > Extras and tick the box that says “Display a mobile theme when this blog is viewed with a mobile browser”.

Statistics can tell some poignant stories. The report says that while 92 per cent of single people have used the internet, this falls dramatically with widowed adults at just 32 per cent. Internet use is also lower amongst people who have an illness or disability, or lower income. Of course, for all those groups there are many people who have overcome barriers to the web, many with the help of UK Online Centres and others. For groups who may suffer from isolation in the real world, accessing the internet is a way to connect people with social opportunities and information.

With mainstream media rarely covering ones own high street, hyperlocal blogs and the chance to connect with neighbours could become a big driver for online audiences. But people won’t find their way onto your site on their own. Bloggers need to find any excuse to have a gathering and get people to knock on their neighbour’s door to bring them along. Plus, we should do more with these roaming youngsters with all the mobile interwebs. I still love the work described by David Bovill at the last Talk About Local unconference. He put a group of people into a room with a cup of tea, surrounded by projected images from laptops, and connected them up with kids on bikes via streaming Skype video feeds. It sounds incredibly high-tech, but is quite easy with the right tools. The possibilities are endless…

It’s really important that as more people go online, we don’t leave behind the people who aren’t there yet.

Two great projects for hyperlocal websites: UK Sound Map and the 4am Project

Here’s a couple of large-scale projects that also create some lovely, localised content which should be of interest to hyperlocal publishers out there.

The first is UK Sound Map – a project from the British Library using Audioboo to create ‘the first nationwide sound map’:

Take part by publishing recordings of your surroundings using the free AudioBoo app…When uploading soundscape recordings via Audioboo, add the tag ‘uksm’ and they’ll appear on the SoundMap.  Visit the SoundMap and enjoy listening to sounds.

Some lovely AudioBoo’s have been uploaded already that really convey a sense of place – from traffic on a busy Baker Street to the sounds of a Great Tit nest and waves on a Pembrokeshire beach.

If you’re encouraging local people to take part as well as contributing yourself, don’t forget to ask them to tag their AudioBoo’s by your area name/postcode (or a tag of your choosing) as well as ‘uksm’ so you can find them easily to include on your community website. And don’t forget that you can subscribe to AudioBoo’s by tags and download the MP3′s, if you have the time and inclination to have a bit more of a play with them yourself!

Tommy Cooper - from my last 4am Project adventure

The next one is a firm favourite of mine – Karen Strunks’ 4am Project ‘to gather a collection of photos from around the world at the magical time of 4am’ has just announced its next event date: 4am on Sunday 17th October.  Taking part is very simple – just upload your photos to the free photo-sharing website Flickr and tag them with the word ’4amproject’.

The 4am Project has already proved to be quite popular with community websites and often groups of local people will meet up to go on a walkabout of the neighbourhood with their cameras.

Try organising a walk in your area – you can embed the above clock onto your website to give readers a count-down.  Again – don’t forget to ask local people to tag their Flickr photos by your area name/postcode (or a tag of your choosing) as well as ’4amproject’ so you can include them on your community website.

So there we have it – a couple of projects you can have lots of fun with and encourage other local people to join in and do the same, so together you can make some great creative content for your website as well as contributing to a much bigger picture! Enjoy.

Monocle’s ‘Rebrand Britainnia’ map

Monocle's Rebrand Britannia map by Chris Unitt

Many thanks to Created in Birmingham for highlighting the above map from the ‘Rebrand Britainnia’ feature in the latest edition of Monocle magazine.  Given that the general premise of the piece is that ‘Great Britain hasn’t seemed quite so great in recent years’, some of the declarations are a bit brutal. From the pointer to the Midlands stating ‘failing towns should be abandoned’ to the West Country as ‘small business terrain’ to Belfast as ‘HQ for national apprentice scheme’, the picture it paints is not terribly pretty. How is your neck of the woods portrayed, and is the judgement a fair one?

talk about local in Swindon

The Cricklade Bugle at cricklade.wordpress.com

Last week I took a trip to Swindon to meet, chat with and later interview the managers of three community websites at CLIP Penhill, a UK online centre on the Penhill estate that has been delivering talk about local training.

My first interview was with John Saunders, manager of the CLIP Penhill Centre and Jon Allan. Between them they manage and train other members of the community to use the website This is Penhill – ‘a site made for the Penhill people to keep them informed about local events, news and information’.

As well as creating a focal point for the community where local people can keep themselves updated, John and Jon also hope the website can help improve external perceptions of the Penhill estate, which has suffered something of a bad press over the years, by telling positive stories. John and Jon plan to introduce and involve more people with the website at a Penhill Forum event on 11th September.

My next interview was with Vicki Farthing, Secretary of a committee campaigning to for a splash park on an desolate old play park in Seven Fields. Vicki built the sevenfieldssplashpark.org website over one weekend to support their campaign to rejuvenate the empty field.

There’s some brilliant use of film on the website with YouTube video creations from committee member Lorna Breslin – slideshows of what the park was in its heyday and what it one day might become with a little money and attention.  By far the best though is the above slideshow of the sorry state it is in today, with a particularly apt soundtrack of Evanescence’s ‘Bring Me to Life’ – “Because that’s what we want to do, we want to bring this back to life.”

Last but not least is Peter Hansen, who created the community website The Cricklade Bugle during a talk about local training session in February.  Peter, who volunteers one half-day a week to maintain the Cricklade UK online centre, has since built it into becoming ‘a community and news website for Cricklade in North Wiltshire.’

Peter is currently the sole writer on the website, updating it with information he receives doing community work with the local leisure centre, church building Jenner Hall, Cricklade Bloomers and other community groups.  “I’m slowly incorporating them into supplying further content for the website.”  The website has already been used by Wiltshire Council to consult the local community about issues such as refuse collection and redevelopment of the leisure centre.

When I told a friend I was going to Swindon for the day they responded rather harshly with ‘eugh’ – I suppose it doesn’t have a reputation of being the most dynamic of places.  But I left feeling very excited and enthused by the people I met, who are all working hard to make their neighbourhoods better and happier places and expressing this brilliantly online with three very different but equally simple community websites, that help make all their organising and campaigning that little bit easier.  I can’t wait to go back!

A new toy for your WordPress blogs

I’ve just had a quick play with a new tool announced on the WordPress blog – Zemanta.

This has the potential to considerably speed up the fiddly business of finding links, images and references to enrich your blog posts, but how useful will it be to the hyperlocal blogger?

I tried it first on an article for Social Stoke about geocaching. As expected, it easily picked up the links to references like geocaching, iphone, gps and other techie words. It is easy to switch links on and off, but I haven’t yet found out how to add one of its recommended links to a word it hasn’t highlighted by itself. It does, however, give you a choice of websites to visit so you can copy the link in the usual way. The suggested photos – from sources like Wikipedia or Flickr’s Creative Commons libraries – were relevant and as easy as the video suggests to just slot in, fully captioned and credited. It also gave me a nice choice of recommended websites for the end to turn on or off. This is an improvement on the previous version of this feature that could sometimes give some random choices.

Next I tried it on an article about Stoke town centre, on the Visit Burslem website. This was a bit more challenging for Zemanta, throwing up suggested images of different parts in Stoke-on-Trent and then Stoke Newington (not to worry, regeneration consultants do the same thing in their brochures all the time, haha). However, once I’d refined the search a couple of times it got to a relevant image. This feature will, of course, depend how many creative commons photos have been added in your patch, so it’s a good time to find some volunteers out there who are willing to add to the collection.

Zemanta is using the same sort of sources as you are likely to be using for its feeds and this feature will speed things up for you. The links feature is also a good time-saver which, as the SEO experts will tell you, will help you get to the top of Google. It seems to go for corporate websites, Wikipedia and recent news articles in its link choices rather than very good but not as well-known local history sites that I might like to link to, but that’s just a small niggle. The only warning note I would sound is that it adds a bit more clutter to the WordPress dashboard and its slick interface may not go down well with older computers, but it can be switched off at any point if this is causing problems.

If you want to give it a try yourself, you can view the video or follow the instructions here.

Can you help with this Help Me Investigate?

A few hyperlocal publishers out there might be able to help with MA student J Townend’s current investigation on Help Me Investigate which asks ‘What are the legal risks for online publishers / bloggers / journalists in the UK?’:

What happens if you’re an online publisher or writer in the UK who doesn’t have access to an in-house lawyer?

• Do online publishers receive many/any legal threats and of what nature?
• How do they deal with them?
• Are there adequate resources available?

I’m currently completing an MA project examining online publishing & media law… As part of this, I am surveying bloggers/journalists about their experiences of media law in the UK.

If you have some experiences you feel are relevant, contact J Townend either via Help Me Investigate or by emailing jt.townend@gmail.com.