On Saturday me and Mike were lucky enough to enjoy a day in the sunshine in the name of work, giving something of a mini social media surgery under a tent in a field. We spent the day introducing people enjoying Fulham Fest to the new community website for the London W14 & SW6 neighbourhoods, a ning site which manager Annette Albert has built up into a fantastic local resource that covers local events, news, groups and information.

We got a fair few signed up to the site and many got cracking with adding to it straight away by poll voting, posting events, starting discussions and joining groups. What was most rewarding was inducting people who initially had reservations, either because of a fear of the technology or because they could not see how it might be used. It was just a few simple steps to show people how easy the site is to navigate and discuss issues important to them that the site could help with.

Getting people there who were at first quite reticent enthusiastic about the site really highlighted the benefits of holding a social media surgery as part of a larger, community event. Many of the people I met on Saturday wouldn't have come to something solely about social media or using a community website, but by being part of a fun and informal family day we were able to teach in a relaxed, 'non-training' atmosphere and get past preconceptions they may have had.

So now I'm all for a social media tent becoming a staple part of local fetes and fairs. Next time you're organising a community festival or gathering, think about making space for a couple of laptops next to the face-painters. It's a great way of raising awareness of a new hyperlocal site and you'd be helping people discover something new, get involved with local activity and carry on communicating long after the party's over.

On Saturday 15th July 'Pindec', of BirminghamB29.com, led a walk around the B29 postcode perimeter. But this was no summer stroll, this was a Tortoise Walk:

Apparently, in 1840s Paris, it was very trendy to wander around with a tortoise on a lead to make sure you were gong at the right speed to truly experience the city - so can anyone lend us a tortoise?

Unfortunately, no-one had a tortoise to spare that day but a sufficiently slow pace was set, 'recording our feelings as we go, in the spirit of the flâneur ("a person who walks a city to experience it").'

Exploring their surroundings in this unusual way meant the walkers started to notice things that had escaped their attention before, and wonder online what that plant is, or why someone saw fit to place a pylon right next to someone's house. They concentrated on derelict buildings and building sites, reflecting on what was there before and what's to come. They explored local historical sites, discovering the Weoley Castle ruins 'completely by accident' and taking the time to wander around. And they discovered 'random things' that just happened to catch their eye whilst they had the time to stop and investigate further.

And the best bit about it was the whole B29 perimeter walk odyssey was recorded on the site by Pindec, who incorporated everyone's comments, photographs and audioboos into her blog post about the day. This meant readers were able to share the walkers' journey - read about their findings, see what made them stop and think and listen to what they had to say out loud.

Taking a different style of journey that makes you look at your area in a new light like this is a great way of generating interesting and unusual content for a hyperlocal site. You could try a Tortoise Walk like the B29ers, or try something a bit different if a snail's pace isn't your style. If you're stuck for ideas The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel is a good starting point, and the website has an Index of Experiments for you to dip into and play with. Fancy 'Taking a Line for a Walk' or 'Blind Man's Buff Travel'? Or how's about a messy hybrid of the two? Mis-guide.com is also worth delving into, leafing through their book A Mis-guide to Anywhere has given me an idea or two.

Have a think and go exploring your area in weird and wonderful ways, either as a group or on your own if you'd prefer. Just be sure to record each new discovery and how you came about it, so your readers can share in your adventure.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover an old friend from my home town of Cardiff, photographer Dan Green, has started a brilliant local photography blog Big Little City - 'a window into the lives of those people who help give cities their unique character'. The site was born out of his first major exhibition, Cardiff Characters, which he has developed in his online space with pictures of people who epitomise Cardiff and reflect its 'unique vibrancy and soul'.

The focus will be on highlighting communities and the people who make them tick be they a rugby star, a bus driver, a lollipop man or lady, an artist, waitress, café owner, musician, dancer, or eccentric.

It got me thinking about how people really make a place, and most communities have a few characters that you couldn't imagine being without - be it because they're local heroes, a bit eccentric, or just that they and what they do is such a long-standing local institution.

I can think of few from my neck of the woods, Digbeth, off the top of my head. John Tighe, landlord of my local The Spotted Dog, who won Birmingham it's Not Shit's Brummie of the Year 2007 for his fight against a Noise Abatement Order. His finest hour on Digbeth is Good is a film of him getting his head shaved for charity. Adam Crossley, author of Keep Digbeth Vibrant and Chair of the Digbeth & Highgate Residents' Association, is always organising great local events with John and starting up quirky local websites.

And then there's Mr Ralph. Mr Ralph is something of a Digbeth institution, invariably found in one of the many Digbeth pubs, peddling customised goods from his battered old suitcases. Rumour has it he holds the last existing Birmingham pedlars license. I found Mr Ralph quite fascinating so I wrote a blog post about him after he kindly agreed to it, including photos of him and his Mr Ralph branded goods.

Do you have any key local characters like this? People who really make your neighbourhood what it is? Talk to them, see if there's a way you could present them and the great stuff they do online somehow - be it with photography, film or just writing about them with passion. Perhaps they'd like to contribute themselves, either on a regular basis or as a one-off with a story they want to tell. Try getting them and their voice onto your site, either by letting them speak for themselves or, if they're a little shy, by telling as much of their story as they're comfortable with. That way your site starts talking about 'who', as well as about 'where' and 'what'.

Watch the YouTube video

By far the most inspirational talk I heard at Open Tech 2009 conference was from Robin, a member of Space Hijackers, who spoke about 'Community and Democracy in Hijacked Space'. I'd recommend you listening again if you have the time.

It was a great to hear about play being used as a surprisingly effective and disruptive method of protest. Space Hijackers, who attempt to 'corrupt the culture of architecture, and destroy the hierarchies that exist' by staging hilariously anarchic happenings, got me thinking about putting the fun back into local campaigning, which many hyperlocal sites find themselves involved with.

Obviously, justifiable anger and reasoned argument about issues causing serious damage to the community is a great and worthwhile thing, I'm not denying that. It's just that sometimes you're met with problems so ridiculous the best option may be to fight like with like.

For instance, Birmingham pub The Rainbow has recently faced closure after Birmingham City Council served a Noise Abatement Order in response to complaints from one lone tenant, who lives in an apartment block built long after the pub was. The council seeing fit to threaten this renowned live music venue because of one complainant, but aspiring to develop the area's cultural character in their Big City Plan, seemed kafkaesque enough to warrant a game. After hearing Robin speak, I was pondering on some noisy, twisted version of musical statues, or a loud complaints choir outside the council house.

The fun doesn't necessarily have be physical, you can have it in your online space too. Keep Digbeth Vibrant do a great job of tempering their obvious frustration with Birmingham City Council Environmental Health, with quirky creations like the spoof Stella advert above and The Digbeth Whisperer newspaper. On my site Digbeth is Good, when Birmingham City Council Leader Mike Whitby commandeered a Big City Plan public consultation bus from my neighbourhood for a photoshoot on the other side of town, I initially responded with righteous indignation. My emails and calls to the press office were met with a wall of silence until the fantastic local satire site Lolitics helped to bring it to a wider audience. Soon after a lolled image of Mike Whitby appeared, closely followed by several of a walrus bemoaning the loss of his bus, I received an apologetic statement from Director of Planning and Regeneration Clive Dutton. The increasing amount of attention from other sources the incident was getting seemed to make them realise ignoring me was not making me go away.

So next time you're met with local plans, politics or problems that would be funny if they weren't so angering, perhaps just try highlighting the funny. Point out the silly and match it. The results this approach gets from The Man may be limited, as he's not known for his sense of humour, but it will make engaging with the issue much more fun for your readers, and give you a bit of light relief from feeling just plain mad.

DiGpuss is the online shop attached to Digbeth is Good, my hyperlocal site about Digbeth's 'culture, pubs and a whole lot more'.

Now, DiGpuss is rather an unusual shop in that it doesn't sell anything. You see, everything in that shop window was a thing that somebody had once lost and I have found. And brought home to DiGpuss. My cat DiGpuss…

If any of this sounds familiar it's because these are the opening lines to the classic children's TV series Bagpuss, which DiGpuss was inspired by. It was born from the fact that, because Digbeth is rather a messy place with seemingly no street cleaning to speak of, I'm continually finding things. Most of it is general rubbish, admittedly, but after a while of walking the Digbeth streets I became aware of certain trends emerging.

The first thing I noticed was a plateful of discarded food at around the same time Gordon Brown was encouraging us all to be frugal and eat our leftovers to beat the credit crunch. I took a photo, and put it in a post stating 'Digbeth says no to food saving'. I would have left it there but I kept discovering more and more food congealing in the surrounding streets - scotch eggs without the eggs, a drain blocked with corned beef hash, a whole loaf of bread tossed into the canal and ignored by the ducks. It just went on and on, and I kept on posting the photos until they warranted their own category 'Digbeth Food Wastage'.

After a while, I began to realise that it wasn't just food I was finding, but human and household objects too. There seemed to be an awful lot of people shedding clothes in Digbeth such as hats, coats, gloves and Cinderella-style lone shoes. Some of my finds were incredibly strange, such as a brand new pair of Moss Bros trousers still in the bag and a photo of a biker girl on holiday.

It was whilst discussing my discoveries with some friends in the pub that a DiGpuss shop was suggested by Birmingham artist Shona McQuillan. It immediately struck a chord with us all and we hatched grand plans for interactive shop windows and Digbeth-themed mice songs. Michael Grimes offered to make the technical magic happen and build it, as I really didn't know where to start. But perhaps that's the point - we had the idea and looked at how to make it a reality afterwards because where there's a will, there's almost always a way.

Discussing it in the cold light of day, Michael and I decided that singing mice might have been a bit time-consuming and ambitious, so it was scaled down to something simpler that still captured and communicated the essence of the thing - I'm going to hand over to Michael at this point, who has kindly written up the science bit:

Digpuss is intentionally minimal: a sort of grittier, no-nonsense version of Bagpuss. I drew a sketchy parody of the Bagpuss logotype and underneath it plonked the picture of Nicky's cat Floss. Nicky also supplied the picture of some grotty Digbeth window; a far cry from the quaint set in Emily's shop, but much more in keeping with the sort of tat that Nicky finds to put in them.

Building Digpuss was a bit of a challenge, because I wanted it to be standards-compliant and not rely on any scripting (such as Javascript); I wanted to write it entirely in html and css. The items in the windows are pulled in from Nicky's tagged images on Flickr (this did require a little bit of scripting, but it's done server-side in PHP and so relieves the browser of any compatibility issues) and displayed as items in an unordered list. When they're clicked on the user is taken to their page on Flickr.

I used two versions of the shop windows image: one untouched and one with the windows cut out. I then sandwiched the list items between the two. As a finishing touch I added opacity to the list items so that the image behind shows through, giving them the appearance of being behind the windows: when moused over they display more clearly, apparently further into the foreground.

However, because I chose to build Digpuss this way it only works as described above in Firefox and Safari; and, I was excited to find, it works beautifully in Safari on the iPhone (the 3GS at any rate). It didn't work at all well in Opera , but surprisingly didn't fare too badly in Internet Explorer. The main issue is opacity, as this is a css property that's not supported in many browsers (yet). There are also issues to do with positioning which may well be to do with my html and not browser problems at all, but I've yet to look into it.

Have you noticed something slightly odd about your area that you might like to present in a more quirky way? You may want to present a trend collectively, rather than in a trickle of disjointed posts that wouldn't communicate a bizarre build-up. You could try playing with maps if they span an area (like I did with my Faunography map of Digbeth animal life), or some kind of slideshow of images, or a mashed-up YouTube movie of film clips. Or you could try building something like a shop from scratch, if that's what you really want to do. The most important thing is to have a think and a talk and a few laughs over some thoughts, let them take shape and then worry about how you're going to achieve it. Never stop a good idea in its tracks because it's beyond you technically.

For instance, William posed a creative quandary to me the other day - my DiGpuss finds are a collection, but Digbeth Food Wastage still remains a category of lone blog posts with no explanation that may seriously perplex newcomers to the site. How might I present them as a whole, rather than in their little pieces? So I thought, and pondered, and today a little light-bulb came on. All the photos as a film slideshow of images with the soundtrack Food Glorious Food. I don't know how to do this, so I stuck my hand up and asked. Twitter is a great place for doing that. And if you get no joy there, try asking the Talk About Local team by emailing helpisathand@talkaboutlocal.org. If we don't know, rest assured that we'll find someone who does!