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.
The following videos have been developed for use in Talk About Local training sessions. Although there are loads of brilliant how-to videos out there which we often use, we thought there was still a need for very simple videos that people could refer to as they got started on their hyperlocal sites. They take you through the development of my model site, Mythical City. Hopefully they are easy to follow with a bit of hands-on help if people get stuck.
It would be great to get your feedback on any ways these videos can be improved as you use them and any requests for further tutorials.
There’s a lot of useful information lying around the web that has local relevance but often people don’t know it’s there or even how to find it. For example, the NHS Choices web site provides the public with a way of rating and reviewing their local health services.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could have this information on your local blog? Well, you can! The video and instructions below show you how you can take feeds from sites like NHS Choices and have them display on your own site, using WordPress.
The principles will allow you to add all sorts of information to your blog using RSS and Atom feeds, where available. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please use the comments section.
Instructions
Copy the link (URL) to the RSS or Atom feed.
In your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance > Widgets
Drag the RSS widget to your sidebar
Copy the URL into the first box.
Configure the remaining options according to your preferred display
Click Save
Refresh your blog and you should see the new widget appear in your sidebar
The thing about websites in local areas is that they’re often not very well linked to one another. I found in Stoke that I would struggle to find websites I’d seen on a shop sign unless I remembered the exact address, because Google wasn’t aware of their existence (see How to get the top of Google). This annoyed me, because I have replaced by memory with Google.
Social Stoke was started to combat this problem and it has two sections: a straightforward blog and a delicious map. The blog looks nicer than a delicious page and means I can add pictures and longer articles, but mainly it is just an aggregate of delicious feeds.
The tag cloud is more useful. As it builds, it creates handy lists of different subjects. For example, here are our local pottery firms and here are some museums. As noted elsewhere, the lists can automatically become RSS feeds for embedding into other sites or tracking on a feed reader.
The easiest way to open this up to collaboration – and it’s great to do this because if you don’t have a passion for fishing clubs, you can be sure someone in your local area does – is by asking people to create their own delicious account and start tagging, including ‘for:socialstoke’ (or whatever your username is). This means you can keep the tags consistent while still sharing the workload.
It doesn’t take very long to make a really useful tag cloud and it makes those Saturday nights watching the X-Factor with your laptop on feel so much more productive!
If you’ve discovered the joys of RSS, you might now be frustrated to discover that not all sites have them. The good news is, you can create your own using the social bookmarking service Delicious. It’s an easy way of adding new links to several sites at the same time and drawing content from several sites into one list.
Head to the pages you want to RSS-ify and bookmark them. This is easier if you have delicious’s bookmarking tools on your bookmark bar.
When you more than one, you have the start of an RSS list. Go to the relevant tag page on delicious (example) and then you can use the RSS feed however you want (example in RSS).
It’s nice to add a Twitter RSS feed about a place to your site as it will generate plenty of fresh content and pick up things you might not know about. But there is a danger that spam will end up appearing.
You can minimise this a little by using Twitter advanced search and cutting out some common bad words, for example for Stoke I exclude ‘porn’, ‘sex’ and ‘escort’. Then you can use the orange link to copy the RSS feed (example) into a WordPress widget.
That will cut out quite a lot of spam, but you might still want to warn your readers that you are drawing the feed in from a public RSS feed and they should follow links with caution.
The sites above are only a very small sample of the hyperlocal sites that are out there. For a more exhaustive list please have a look at the excellent Openly Local Hyperlocal Sites Map. We may update this list from time to time but recommend that if you run a hyperlocal site you add it to the Openly Local Map.
