Watch the YouTube video

This documentary of one man’s journey into the derelict Birmingham Battery building is one of the best YouTube films I’ve ever seen.  Not because of the production skills of creators Living Proof Films (great though they are), but because of the quite emotional narration.  You really do see inside the iconic building from the photographer’s perspective:

You begin to see the building as having a life of its own.  It has characteristics and charms, like a person does.  I must admit, I felt an attraction to the Birmingham Battery.

Although you do learn some things about the building whilst watching it, you are not left feeling you’ve been told all its facts and figures, instead you go on quite an intimate journey with the narrator and learn how he feels about the space.

Expressing a personal preference like this is far from a bad thing – buildings and spaces are not only special because of their architectural or scenic merit, they become special to people because of the responses they illicit or what happens within them.

For instance, many born and bred Brummies I know get quite nostalgic when walking past Snobs nightclub, a nondescript building which contained many a night of youthful abandon and coming-of-age episodes.  During a recent pub conversation no sooner had one person mentioned Snobs than everyone else enthusiastically chipped in with their stories.  It ended with plans to take a group trip there, to share more memories that walking through the nightclub might bring to mind. That’s the great thing about expressing your reactions to a shared space like that – others will be compelled to join in the conversation with their own tales about it.

Jon Bounds highlighted the importance of sharing personal stories about spaces when he created his Campaign for Real Heritage blue stickers, encouraging us to see that what we feel is important about a place holds as much value as the National Trust’s seal of approval, and should be duly marked:

‘…the real people have history too. It deserves recognition, YOUR history deserves a blue plaque.’

Ben Whitehouse spoke of creating a tour of alternative Birmingham landmarks, asking for suggestions of stories rather than traditional tourist spots.

I’d like to put together a list of places around the city (preferably the city centre) that hold personal resonances for people who’ve visited Birmingham, people who live, work and play here.

I’ve been running my own hyperlocal blog Digbeth is Good for just over a year now and, although it initially just contained local news, events and reviews, as my confidence grew it also unashamedly became my own personal journey through the area.  But I found readers reacted rather well to this, sometimes responding in kind with their own take on things.  For instance, an early post about Guardoggy prompted Bobbie Gardner to comment with her encounters of the dog.

So don’t be afraid to get personal with your site, and convey to readers your own reaction to the area as well as news and infomation about it.  You never know, it may encourage readers to chip in with their own stories and your site could become more than an information hub, it could be a place where a community feels free to express itself.

One of my favourite books at the moment is called Watching the English, by Kate Fox. In it she puts forward some very persuasive generalisations about how we use our gardens, including the observation that we will wait for months for an opportune moment to speak to our neighbours in their front gardens rather than knock on their front doors.  This is certainly true for me – memories of a stint selling Avon door-to-door still bring me out in a cold sweat – and it holds true in Stoke-on-Trent, right through to her other observation that except when they are serving as a neutral space to chat about the weather and that awkward planning application you put in, front gardens are for show only.

Anyway, it was looking for a more succint reference to these observations that I stumbled across a new seam of hyperlocal blogging in Britain: the garden blogs. Starting off with the Patient Gardener’s Weblog from Worcestershire, the bloggers have formed a clear community across the country and share delightful photos, drawings, questions and observations. A look through the Patient Gardener’s blogroll quickly takes you as far as California and Nova Scotia, but of course many of you will prefer sticking to England and the chance to peer into some luscious hidden back gardens and allotments. You can even follow the journey of a novice bee-keeper.

There’s always a bit of a perception that blogging is for computer geeks or wannabe politic pundits, but the ease of blogging, linking and adding photography means that there are plenty of communities sharing their passions for each other and the rest of the world. If you’re wondering whether this applies to your hobbies and interests, have a browse round WordPress’s Showcase section or Google blog search. (example). ‘Passion-blogging’ is also a great place to start if you’re not sure you have anything interesting enough to blog about. Regular, enthusiastic, reflective and useful blogging will always find an audience, especially if you make the effort to put friendly feelers out to other bloggers through comments and links to posts you enjoy. And as the gorgeous gardening blogs show, there’s no such thing as too hyperlocal.

Pretty photos courtesy of the Flickr community and Flickriver.

Jon Bounds is part of Birmingham’s wonderfully creative  social media scene.  He runs Birmingham It’s Not Shit and played an important part in the outstanding repurposing of a dreary council consultation in Big City Talk.

We talked about how we could make small hyperlocal stories visible on the national scene by aggregating them into a single feed.  And reducing the search cost for a journalist or someone who is interested but not ‘from these parts’.  So Jon has used Yahoo pipes to create user-customisable feeds from Birmingham’s local sites by tagging and searching.  So if you want a feed about arts in Birmingham you just enter arts as your keyword.  Jon describes it on his blog and talks through the process so you can do it yourself.   It is a prototype, but very good – have a play here but read Jon’s explanation first.  Let Jon know how it could be improved or if you have seen a better way of aggregating local feeds.