Hyperlocal voices: Jon Bounds (Birmingham: It’s Not Shit)

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Hyperlocal blog Birmingham: it's not shit

Jon Bounds surely has the claim to the most memorable title of a hyperlocal blog. Birmingham: It’s Not Shit (“Mildly sarcastic since 2002”) is a legend of the local and national blogging scene in which Jon has been a pioneer. In the latest of my ‘Hyperlocal Voices’ series, he describes the history of the site:

Who were the people behind BiNS, and what were their backgrounds before setting it up?

There was, and to a large extent still is, just me Jon Bounds. Although I’ve now got a couple of ‘columnists’ and feel that there are people around that I can call on to let me have a break.

I’ve an odd background of a Degree in Computer Science and a postgrad (CIty & Guilds) qualification in Journalism (and a brief, not entirely successful time as a freelancer on very poor music publications), but it was really working on internet design books in the late 90s that made me think about “the web” as a method of sharing.

As a kid I’d run fanzines (computer games and later football), but there were real creatives getting to grips with the web at that time and that was exciting.

What made you decide to set up the blog?

The blog part of the site came a couple of years after the site itself — which was originally a much flatter website with funny articles/video and a forum. The idea behind the site came as a direct reaction to the terribly drab view of the city that Marketing Birmingham/the Council put forward for the European City of Culture bid in 2002 — and the fact that all of the local media went unquestioningly with it.

Birmingham wasn’t – and still isn’t – a city of loft living and canalside bars, yet “organisations” only seemed comfortable with that little bit of it. To cover the bits of Brum that real people recognise and care about is still the main thrust of the site. Continue reading →

Hyperlocal voices: Alderleyedge.com’s Lisa Reeves

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Hyperlocal site alderleyedge.com

Following on from last week’s blog post on the founder of Parwich.org, I interviewed Lisa Reeves, the co-founder of alderleyedge.com, launched in 2009 and already selling out advertising.

Who were the people behind the blog, and what were their backgrounds before setting it up?

I run alderleyedge.com with my husband Martin, we live in the village. Martin built the site, so we own the technology, and I do the rest.

Martin set up his first internet company 13 years ago, and has always worked on internet based businesses of his own. I worked in publishing for 8 years then spent several years running the commercial side of internet businesses before giving up my career to be a stay at home mum.

What made you decide to set up the blog?

I wouldn’t describe alderleyedge.com as a blog, more a community news and information platform. A primary motivation for setting up the site was so that I could have a flexible job that I enjoyed as the children started to spend more time in school. The concept of alderleyedge.com seemed perfect as it allowed us to combine our experience in the Internet sector with our passion for the village in which we live.

We also felt that Alderley Edge was poorly served by its local newspaper, The Wilmslow Express, which seemed very much focused on the adjoining town of Wilmslow, and paid very little attention to Alderley Edge which it also purported to cover – although they seem to be providing a lot more coverage of Alderley Edge since we have become more established. Continue reading →

The first Birmingham Hacks/Hackers meetup – Monday Sept 20

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Those helpful people at Hacks/Hackers have let me set up a Hacks/Hackers group for Birmingham. This is basically a group of people interested in the journalistic (and, by extension, the civic) possibilities of data. If you’re at all interested in this and think you might want to meet up in the Midlands sometime, please join up.

I’ve also organised the first Hacks/Hackers meetup for Birmingham on Monday September 20, in Coffee Lounge from 1pm into the evening.

Our speaker will be Caroline Beavon, an experienced journalist who caught the data bug on my MA in Online Journalism (and whose experiences I felt would be accessible to most). In addition, NHS Local’s Carl Plant will be talking briefly about health data and Walsall Council’s Dan Slee about council data.

All are welcome and no technical or journalistic knowledge is required. I’m hoping we can pair techies with non-techies for some ad hoc learning.

If you want to come RSVP at the link.

PS: There’s also a Hacks/Hackers in London, and one being planned for Manchester, I’m told.

Podcasting: the experiences of Bagel Tech News

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Bagel Tech News podcast

As part of the research into a forthcoming book on online journalism (UPDATE: now published), I interviewed Ewen Rankin of independent podcast Bagel Tech News. Here are his responses in full:

The background

My background is as a commercial photographer. I started life in graphic design and quickly moved to shooting photographs for the agency at which I worked. It was kind of a lucky transition as I wasn’t much cop as a graphic artist. I took fairly low level stuff to start with (picture business cards were all the rage in the 80s) and then moved to more commercial work shooting the advertising shots for Pretty Polly and Golden Lady tights in about 1988.

I start broadcasting in July 2008 and after two weeks Amber Macarthur made us Podcast of the Week on the Net@Night show with Leo Laporte. Listenership rose and we began to grow.

The Daily News show was published… daily until November 2008 and then I started publishing the BOG Show with Marc Silk, and was opened by Andy Ihnatko on 30th November 2008. I removed Marc from the show in Christmas 2009 and installed a ‘Skype Wall’ in January 2010 to run a more panel based show. More shows have been added in the intervening period and the network now has 7 active shows Continue reading →

Playing with heat-mapping UK data on OpenHeatMap

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heat mapping test />

Last night OpenHeatMap creator Pete Warden announced that the tool now allowed you to visualise UK data. I’ve been gleefully playing with the heat-mapping tool today and thought I’d share some pointers on visualising data on a map.

This is not a tutorial for OpenHeatMap – Pete’s done a great job of that himself (video below) – but rather an outline of the steps to get some map-ready data in the first place. Continue reading →

Hyperlocal voices: Mike Atkinson from Parwich.org

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Hyperlocal blog Parwich.org

Earlier this year I interviewed blogger Mike Atkinson, who launched Parwich.org in 2008. I wanted to get a feel for how the reality of hyperlocal blogs compared with the perception (there are other interviews to follow). Here are his responses:

Who were the people behind the blog, and what were their backgrounds before setting it up?

Local villagers (current team is six people), differing backgrounds and interests. I’ve been blogging since 2001 (my personal blog was one of the better known UK blogs in the first half of the decade, and was shortlisted for a Bloggie award), but the others had no prior blogging or website management experience. Most had never even read a blog before.

What made you decide to set up the blog?

Official reason: to promote the fund-raising activities for our proposed Memorial Hall rebuild. We needed to provide evidence to potential funders that we were an active self-organised community, and this seemed like an idea vehicle. Also, we could offer promotion for funding bodies in our Sponsors section on the blog sidebar, which might have been an added inducement for them.

But speaking personally, as the person who first suggested the blog, I simply wanted the blog to help foster and maintain a sense of community in a village whose resources at the time felt under threat – and I wanted to give us an effective voice when presenting ourselves and our concerns to the outside world. Continue reading →

Online News Survey – suggestions wanted

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Global news provider Small World News Service and online research company OnePoll are looking to undertake a large study which will research how the public access and use news online.

After discussing possible angles to take with the survey, it was decided that it would be good to work with the Online Journalism Blog to crowdsource possible avenues to take with the research.

The goal is to produce a number of studies that can help news professionals, journalists and anyone else with an interest understand the attitude and behaviours of online news consumers.

Our method will be to conduct a survey with a large representative sample of UK internet users.

After the study has been completed we will publish both the report and the data on the OnePoll website and make it freely available.

So if you have any suggestions for questions or possible angles then I would be delighted to hear about them.

You can contact me on Twitter @oliconner or email oli2706@gmail dot com

Lessons in crowdsourcing: Claire Wardle on using Ushahidi for the Tube strike

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The following is cross-posted from Claire Wardle’s blog:

Late on Monday night, I wrote a short post in anticipation of the crowdmap I’d just set up for BBC London, which I hoped would provide a useful service the following day for the London tubestrike, 7th September 2010.

It’s now Wednesday morning, and I can write, while still feeling slightly shell-shocked from the experience, that all in all, I’m very pleased with how it went.

I want to use this post to reflect on some of the things that worked, some of the things that didn’t work as well, and some things I will do differently if the next scheduled tube strike goes ahead.

Bottom line was that lots of people saw it: 18,860 unque visitors, and 39,306 page views from 55 countries. 13,808 were from the UK, 3863 from the US, and I can’t get over the fact that we had 2 people form Bermuda, 1 person from Uruguay, and 9 from Kenya, the home of the Ushahidi platform. The power of social media never ceases to amaze me.

We posted 202 reports yesterday. About 50 were sent directly to the map from the audience, either via the web form or the specific SMS channel we set up. The rest of the reports we took from twitter, either tweets in the #tubestrike stream or replies to the @BBCTravelalert account. Continue reading →

Charities data opened up – journalists: say thanks.

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Having made significant inroads in opening up council and local election data, Chris Taggart has now opened up charities data from the less-than-open Charity Commission website. The result: a new website – Open Charities.

The man deserves a round of applause. Charity data is enormously important in all sorts of ways – and is likely to become more so as the government leans on the third sector to take on a bigger role in providing public services. Making it easier to join the dots between charitable organisations, the private and public sector, contracts and individuals – which is what Open Charities does – will help journalists and bloggers enormously.

A blog post by Chris explains the site and its background in more depth. In it he explains that:

“For now, it’s just a the simplest of things, a web application with a unique URL for every charity based on its charity number, and with the basic information for each charity available as data (XML, JSON and RDF). It’s also searchable, and sortable by most recent income and spending, and for linked data people there are dereferenceable Resource URIs.

“The entire database is available to download and reuse (under an open, share-alike attribution licence). It’s a compressed CSV file, weighing in at just under 20MB for the compressed version, and should probably only attempted by those familiar with manipulating large datasets (don’t try opening it up in your spreadsheet, for example). I’m also in the process of importing it into Google Fusion Tables (it’s still churning away in the background) and will post a link when it’s done.”

Chris promises to add more features “if there’s any interest”.

Well, go on…