To see your area in a new light (literally) and get some interesting visual content for a local website, I'd really recommend taking part in Karen Strunks' 4am Project, a photography project using the photo sharing network Flickr 'to gather a collection of photos from around the world at the magical time of 4am'.  Karen devised the project after finding herself driving home at 4am and noticing how different her surroundings seemed at the time:

I live in Birmingham – the UK’s second largest city – and after a night out a while back, I was driving from one side of the city to the other. It was around 4am and I was really struck by the cityscape. Streets and roads normally teeming with people and traffic were deserted. The city was asleep and it felt like I had it all to myself. I liked it.

People can take part in the 4am Project at any time of the year by taking photos between 4am-5am and uploading them onto Flickr tagged '4amproject' (if you're not on Flickr and unsure where to start, try reading our guide to Sharing photos with Flickr).

However, every so often Karen organises a special 4am Project date, encouraging everyone to take photos to get a global snapshot of 4am.  So, on Sunday 6th December, a lot of people will be waking up very early and bracing the cold and dark to take pictures whilst their neighbours are still asleep.

I did the 4am Project for my site Digbeth is Good and found it showed me a whole new side of Digbeth - a world of serenely deserted back streets, which contrasted heavily with the High Street full of people spilling out of noisy nightclubs in search of fast food and taxis.  I got to meet people I wouldn't have otherwise come across - nightclub bouncers, kebab house workers and early morning cleaners on their way to work.  It was a real eye-opener, for me and my readers.

I'm not a terribly good photographer, but found my simple digital camera was enough to help me capture the quirky things I noticed - a girl climbing over railings in search of a taxi, a discarded pair of shoes and the staff at Salt 'n' Peppers sweeping up.

So take part if you can to find out what does or doesn't happen where you are in the early hours.  Try encouraging others to do the same, using the above print-off poster and a countdown clock you can embed into your website.  Ask local people participating to tag their Flickr photos with the place name as well as '4amproject' so you can feed them into your website.  You could even do what Karen does in Birmingham and organise a group walkabout, which is great for moral support if you don't feel safe wandering around alone and it's good fun to go for a big breakfast afterwards.  So set your alarms and charge your cameras or camera-phones for the 6th December, and be sure to wrap up warm!

I've come across some truly inspiring links today, which I felt the need to share.  The first is from Adam Westbrook saying The future of journalism is out there (what's stopping you?), which concludes with the above image and some great advice for everyone - be it journalist, blogger, whatever:

It’s the attitude which gets inventors, artists…and yes, even entrepreneurs out of bed in the morning.  And it is the attitude which delivers the key to the future of journalism...The whole point is we have to stop being careful! Take some  risks, get your hands dirty!

Go on, get some serious attitude!

And then Pete Ashton linked to this lovely night-time scribbling by Keri Smith, which can help us all give our attitude that creative edge. Anyone wanting to create interesting and unusual content for their local website would do well do stick this on their fridge/computer/forehead:

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.

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!

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.