Out of the Box exhibition

Try writing about any visual art that is on display in your area, such as in a local art gallery, museum or arts centre.  This could be a simple notice of a forthcoming art exhibition, as Ventnor Blog did with the Out of the Box photographic exhibition at Dimbola Lodge.

The Monolith

Or, if you or a contributor to your site visit the exhibition, why not take some photos and write about your perceptions and thoughts on the pieces?  You don’t need of be any kind of expert in art to have a reaction to it, I certainly wasn’t when I described a piece of abstract video art I saw in a Digbeth gallery as ‘Monolith Goes On Holiday’.

If you feel you need to know a bit more about the exhibition than is on the programme or factsheet, don’t be afraid to ask the gallery workers, they often enjoy the chance to have a conversation.

Sheep On The Road, Belfast

Of course, not all art will be tucked away in galleries or museums.  Are there any interesting or impressive pieces of public art where you live?  You could publish a picture with some information, which would delight readers who have often passed it and wondered what the story was behind it.  Alan in Belfast didn’t stop at just a write-up of one piece of public art in his city, but did a whole tour that took in various sculptures and cathedral spires.

Bishopthorpe War Memorial

Perhaps there’s a piece of public art that has historical significance, such as the local war memorial. Bishopthorpe.net wrote a lovely post about the recent cleaning of the Bishopthorpe War Memorial.  There is also a very touching post featuring the men on the war memorial and one’s life story.

As One: Welcome to Brum

It could be that there is art in your local area which is not really meant to be there at all – street artists have used Digbeth’s walls as a canvas, which made for a nice post about one of the most prolific culprits ‘As One’ on Created in Birmingham.

Take a look around your area and see what local art and sculpture you can feature on your website.  If you have local art galleries, museums and arts centres, see if they will put you on their press release list, so you are emailed information and images for forthcoming exhibitions. When you visit the shows, be sure to take your camera, pick up a factsheet and have a good long chat with the gallery workers to give your write-ups some serious insight. And don’t be afraid to talk about your personal interpretation – people like a human touch and even if they disagree with you, at least you’re starting a discussion on a local issue!

Check out the local council website for information on public art (Birmingham City Council have a dedicated web page), or give them a call to see if you can find out more.  If the artwork you’re reviewing is some graffiti or street art, try searching for the tag name to see if the artist have a website, blog or Flickr account.

A great way to pull in local content for your site is to do a regular search of YouTube for your postcode or area name and see if there are any relevant videos on there that you can embed into a post on your website.

I subscribe to searches for YouTube videos tagged ‘Digbeth’ (via RSS) and this comes up with some great little films that I simply wouldn’t have come across otherwise, such as this video of someone playing the organ in my local church.  When I let the organist know I’d put his film onto my website by commenting, he came along to Digbeth is Good and left a nice comment on the post.

When new community website The Moretonhampstead Hub searched YouTube for local videos, they found this lovely clip of the local school choir singing.

You might also find using YouTube in this way means you’re pulling in content from young people, who often upload videos taken with their cameras or mobile phones.  I loved this film of night out at the Custard Factory and the young film-makers loved that I bought it to a wider audience.

William Perrin of Kings Cross Environments found there was such an abundance of clips relating to Kings Cross, he created the dedicated website Kings Cross TV to house them – splitting them into channels such as Books, Current Affairs and Harry Potter at Kings Cross.  William’s discovered some real local gems here, but my personal favourite is this one of a Flash Snog at St Pancras.

#TAL10 Unawards prizes

Here’s a quick details update for the Unconference and Unawards this Saturday.  So book your train tickets, set your alarms, synchronize your watches…

#TAL10 Unconference

The Unconference is held at Old Broadcasting House in central Leeds, follow this link for location and parking details.

The TAL team will be at the venue from 9.00am, because we’re a hard-working bunch.  You’re welcome to join us and share in our early bird breakfast buffet.  The Unconference itself will kick off from 10.00am and things will roughly run as follows:

9.00am – Venue open for an early bird breakfast
10.00am – Introductions and session planning for the day
10.30am – 4 x session one’s
11.30pm – 4 x session two’s
12.30pm – Lunch! Nom.
1.30pm – 4 x session three’s
2.30pm – 4 x session four’s
3.30pm – Wrapping up
4.00pm – Guardian Leeds Beat Blogger John Baron will lead everyone on a guided tour to the Unawards venue, Chilli White, where you can enjoy a drinks in the bottom bar before the grand event that is…(drum roll)….

#TAL10 Unawards

The Unawards are from 6.00pm in the top bar at Chilli White, just behind the Corn Exchange in central Leeds.  We are busy musing over your nominations for winners right now, to decide who will receive the gorgeous prizes pictured above (courtesy of Latif’s Wholesale, Digbeth).  Let us know if you can think of some deserving winners for these precious things.

#TAL10 Friday night curry

As we’re starting early we’ll be staying in Leeds the Friday night before, as will a few others who are coming from far afield.  So if you’re around please join us for a warm-up curry.  We’ll be meeting at 7.00pm in Northbar (New Briggate, central Leeds) for a pint before sitting down to eat in Akbars at 8.30pm.

Camp Hill Flyover, Birmingham, 1970 by Lady Wulfrun

Every so often I find myself emailing people who have requested links and/or information about creating community content around a particular subject or issue.  I’m thinking it would be better for me to share that information with everyone, so I’m going to  start copying it into blog posts here.  One topic I get asked a lot about is local heritage, and how bringing this online can generate discussion and get people sharing their memories.  When people ask me about heritage, I usually send them the following:

• People really react to a bit of local history on a community website.  Look at the comments on this post of a photo of 1970′s Digbeth. People remembered the flyover and reacted with their own personal stories about it. Similarly with William’s post about the Beaconsfield Buildings in Kings Cross – people started commenting about their families’ connections to the building, and people tracing their family trees are now coming to this post via genealogy forums.
• Old photos and interviews with older residents who’ve witnessed changes over the years are always popular. Rescue Geography is a project all about collecting and curating  people’s memories of a place, you could explore that for some ideas.
• The Birmingham Irish Heritage Group contribute regularly to Digbeth is Good, which helps bring their activity and a taste of their events to wider audience.
• Another interesting site is: http://ourhistory-hayes.blogspot.com: ‘A site dedicated to the work of Hayes Labour Association, Hayes & Harlington Labour Party, Hayes Communist Party, Trade Unionists, and working men and women of West Middlesex.’

• Last but not least Seaside Voices is a project talk about local are delivering in partnership with Community Media Assocation, People’s Voice Media and UK online centres. We’re working with four UK online centres in seaside towns to help facilitate an online discussion of their town in its past, present and future.  The Seaside Voices websites for Bridlington, Morecambe, Newlyn and Shanklin are examples of sites that will not only look back at the history of a place, but also delve deeper to highlight current activity and look ahead to what’s in store in the future.

If you know of any other good examples of heritage sites, or local heritage content on community websites, please share and comment!

We have now closed the nominations for the Talk About Local UnAwards categories and will make final decisions as to which of the categories we are going to open up for nominations over the Christmas & New Year break.

The highly coveted UnAwards will be presented at a ceremony which will take place a little later than we first said and somewhere other than the West Midlands.

We have been speaking to a sponsor for the next Talk About Local UnConference and we are currently investigating some venues in the the North of England for an event in the first quarter of 2010.  Once we have got a confirmed venue we will give you more details.  The UnAwards will be presented at a glittering ceremony after the UnConference.

All that remains is for William, Nicky, Clare and I to wish you a very happy Christmas & New Year.

As any DiGpuss fans will know, I’m constantly finding things on the Birmingham streets that someone, somewhere once owned.  It’s usually discarded, battered tat but occasionally I’ll find something that I suspect its rightful owner might want back, such as the above leather jacket, which I discovered in the Custard Factory after a large event the previous night.  I did the right thing and handed it in and, just in case the owner happened to read Digbeth is Good, wrote a post about it explaining where it could be collected from.

There are other cases of local websites starting to be used to help with lost and found – take Meowsley, a local website all about cats in Birmingham’s Moseley village.  The site seems to be a very amusing, localised version of Kitten War, giving each cat entered a full-feature profile including photograph and scores out of ten for agility, meow, overall cuteness, dignity, etc.  When one of these cats goes missing, something interesting happens – a call to action goes out to all the cat-lovers in Moseley to look out for that particular cat.  The site even has special email address to respond to in such cases, emergency@meowsley.co.uk.

I particularly like their coverage of the disappearance of Didier because readers got to find out what happened – he was found locked in a neighbour’s shed.  When people see the start of even a small story like a missing cat, they like to hear the end.

Twitter is being increasingly used to raise local awareness of lost and founds pets.  Last week Jon Bounds used it to try and find the owner of a small, brown bunny rabbit he found near his Birmingham home.  He eventually tracked them down through a neighbour, but I’m convinced I’ll see a lost/found pet case resolved through Twitter very soon.

More importantly, this way of spreading the word quickly in your community can be used when people go missing.  Last Thursday, Soulla Stylianou’s 92 year-old father-in-law went missing for several hours.  She was understandably very concerned and wanted as many people in Birmingham as possible keeping an eye out for him, so posted an SOS on Twitter with a link to a recent picture of him.   It was retweeted endlessly, including a retweet by Missing_UK, so pretty much everyone on Twitter in Birmingham knew if they saw a man fitting his description, they needed to let Soulla know.  Thankfully he was found safe in a local hospital, where he’d been taken after a minor bump to the head, and is now home and well.

If you run a local website, think about using it to raise awareness of local lost and founds.  If you see a poster put up by a worried pet owner, take a picture of it and publish it.  If your website has a corresponding Twitter account, like the bournvillenews Twitter partner of Hannah Waldrum’s Bournville Village, tweet links to the lost/found post to talk to even more people.  The same can be done with local Facebook contacts, groups and pages.

You could even create a Lost and Found category or page, so people have a local online port of call.  This can be particularly effective on a Forum-style local website or a Ning site, where everyone has equal publishing rights, as the Sheffield Forum have shown with their Lost & Found page.  For instance, a recent post about a found dog was viewed 83 times.

And if you do start to introduce lost and found features to your site, be sure to satisfy the local interest by letting readers know the end of the story – especially if it has a happy ending, which everybody loves.

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 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’.

Busker by Dan Green

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’.