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Hyperlocal in the UK

How big is the local web in Scotland?

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There are some great independent local websites in Scotland that give their community a voice online. They range from the new MyTuriff (even the Turra Coo has her own Facebook identity), through to the vibrant community voices of Greener Leith and the Gurn from Nurn in Nairn, Denistoun in Glasgow has a superb forum and Edinburgh the excellent journalism-driven Edinburgh Reporter. There’s some marvelous state of the art sites like URTVs Helensborough and Lomond and augmented reality on  Visit Turiff. And some good sites about to get going like the Digital Sentinel in Wester Hailes.  STV is also in on the act with a small suite of sites.

All these sites show a genuine, grass roots face to the world that is owned or run by local people. In a world that uses Google to find the end of its nose, these independent sites present an engaging, attractive and above all real face to the world online. They feature a diversity of real local voices, rather than being an official outlet. It’s the sort of authenticity that the internet relishes – the antidote to bland tourist brochure-ware, council invest here leaflets, rabid Trip Advisor reviews and general marketing pap.

But I can’t work out if the great sites above are the tip of the iceberg or an exception to the rule. Is there a vast undercurrent of lively community websites about Scotland’s vibrant communities or are there in fact, very few? At Talk About Local we help run a map of UK hyperlocal sites and, despite years of digging away in our spare time and speaking to people who run sites in Scotland, our worry is that the latter may be true. We can find a lot of now elderly, broken or failing sites for Scottish places from the first wave of the web – dating from around ten years ago but they have little scope for interaction nor integration with modern social media.  And the voice in these sites is often a slightly ‘official’ one.  A simple wordpress.com blog would probably be cheaper and ten times more attractive and effective.

Although unashamedly English, over the last 20 years I have traveled the length and breadth of Scotland for business and pleasure. I’m speaking at an Arts and Humanities Research Council event tomorrow in Edinburgh about so-called hyperlocal media. I shall ask if anyone has ever surveyed the landscape of the scottish local web, should they? Has there ever been a scheme to work with local communities to find their own voice online? Should there be? I’d be interested to hear from commenters on this blog.  If you have some sites you’d like to submit to the map we’d be delighted.

(We moderate for politeness, relevance etc.)

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  1. I’d say “exception to the rule”. There are plenty of marketing agencies, social media “experts” and the like blogging about their corner of the world, but it’s so Pimms’ infused it’s hardly as real as face as these ones. The other thing, though, is that Scotland remains small, and so these ‘small’ blogs actually have disproportionate impact, for their size. This is a good thing, and they feed into mainstream news quite easily for that.

  2. Interesting article Will – the Caithness.org site springs to mind immediately. I don’t know who runs it but it hits the spot in the far north and I hear the dead tree media are envious of its reach. They’ve been going for quite a while too.
    http://forum.caithness.org/

  4. When you say there are ‘very few’ ‘lively community websites about Scotland’s vibrant communities’ – give us some numbers. How many do you think there currently are, and how many more sites/groups/pages/communities online in Scotland do you want to find until you are satisfied that there is a proportionately decent sized iceberg in Scotland? So, your numbers please, Will! That’s a fair way to judge and compare.

    Dipping in and out of an area from afar isn’t going to answer your question. I bet that you move to an area of Scotland for a couple of months, you’ll find hundreds more online Scottish communities – many, many, of which are in Facebook groups – than you thought existed.

    The final thing to remember is that the population here is smaller than London, it’s more spread out and in some cases still struggling with woeful connection speeds.

    But if you can’t move to Scotland for a wee bit, how about some of us who are interested enough try and bolster the Scottish representation on this TAL map?

  5. A good read but I think Michael makes the most pertinent point: many of these groups are not necessarily on web but on Facebook or elsewhere. Let’s also play fair & point out that some councils are good at sharing useful, relevant information but some dismiss it because it’s the voice of a firm/org and not of a person.

    Not every area is going to have a large enough concentration of people for a unique or unbiased point of view/piece of information and the reasons for that are many.

    The bigger question is how do we get people finding these sites because very few people will trawl through Google these days…

  6. Nice lively debate on the Scottish scene. My 2p worth to cover some of the comments above:

    @Michael MacLeod – Going off the openly Local directory there are only around 25 sites listed in Scotland, not that this is the definitive list, but it is where a lot of people start when looking at Hyperlocals in any area. Inclusion in the directory is on a request basis, IE the site owner fills the details in and it gets added, so maybe there is some promotion to be done to improve the Scottish listings.

    ‘Dipping in from afar’ I’m ‘dipping in’ from Aberdeenshire and while I agree with you that there are sites out there when you start digging, the point is people shouldn’t be digging, we need to help surface the sites that are out there for people to find and support them.

    Even with a population smaller than London in an area 2/3 the size of England, I personally feel that there is opportunity for far more local sites than in England. Having been a regular visitor for 15 years and now living in Scotland, I think that the sense of community is a lot stronger in rural Scotland, these communities are small and could each sustain their own website, if not for news and events for tourism.

    Facebook is good for communities, to a point, if you are not on Facebook then you are excluded and really good content gets lost far too easily. Also people don’t want to join a community if they are researching where to visit or where to stay in an area. There needs to be a mix of Web and Facebook. People complain about digital first and how it excludes people who aren’t online, I’d wager that Facebook first excludes more people who are online but choose to not be in Facebook..

    I’ve written a chapter about Scottish Hyperlocal & Facebook, for the next edition of What Do We Mean By Local, as soon as it is ready for publication I’ll share it.

    We’d be delighted if people who are interested helped us to improve the Openly Local map and promote the Scottish Hyperlocals

  7. I just want to add a little more to this discussion. Will asks “Has there ever been a scheme to work with local communities to find their own voice online? Should there be?”
    At a time when much is focused on the macro debate about the future governance of Scotland hyperlocal persents the perfect areana to get down to the micro issue about how we sort out the governance of communities in Scotland in the face of at least 20 years of creeping centralisation.

    There is a Community Renewal and Empowerment Bill going through the Scottish Parliament, at the consultation stage just now, I wonder if communities finding their voices online features in anyway in Scottish Government thinking?

    One site that some of you may or may not have seen is this interesting one: The Scottish Community Alliance
    http://www.scottishcommunityalliance.org.uk/

    I always try to make the time to read the Alliance newsletters, their latest one begins: “A while ago we reported that we had commissioned work to pull together a more detailed picture of all the different networks that make up the membership of the Alliance. This work is almost complete and soon to be published on our website. But the back-story as to how and why all these community based networks have emerged in recent years is an open question. Alex Walker, former chair of DTAS, offers an opinion in a paper he presented at a conference last week.” And then there is an essay entitled: “The fall and rise of the Scottish Community”

    “http://www.scottishcommunityalliance.org.uk/policy-talk/policy-articles/1670/

  8. I really don’t think much digging is needed to improve that map and make it reflect what’s actually going on.