Hyperlocal news wire

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.