Hyperlocal Hedon Blog

THE HEDON BLOG was the subject of a presentation and discussion of Hyperlocal News at Humber Mud recently. The following is the set of slides presented at that event with accompanying notes to each slide below:

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Hyperlocal Hedon Blog

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1. Typical ‘front page’ of the Hedon Blog.
2. The type of news that is ‘hyperlocal’ i.e. of interest to a very small audience – like ‘dog poo’ problems in the neighbourhood or holes in the ground!
3. Popular Hedon Blog article of 2009 – the Free ASDA bus!
4. The tragic death of Amy Black was a shock and people from around the world sought further news via the blog.
5. Different ways that people can get the Hedon Blog information they want.
6. The changes in the traditional newspaper industry that have renewed interest in hyperlocal news.
7. Hobby blogging can bring passion, commitment and local insight. HOTI dog photo by Linda Hinchcliffe.
8. Yes! – There is an active community in Hedon as demonstrated by the What’s On page and Wish List experiment. The Jigsaw Player and General Election Coverage are two examples of catering to particular audiences. Hedon Beacon photo by Neil Holmes.
9. Beat Blogging – the daily routine of finding and gathering news for the blog.
10. Excellent e-book by Adam Westbrook on the essentials of hyperlocal news gathering.
11. Making it Pay 1 – It doesn’t have to!
12. Making it Pay 2 – But if you don’t want to run at a loss! Source: Philip John.
13. Inspiring Hyperlocal news websites – not published see Slideshare.
14. Talk About Local – Leeds event bringing together hyperlocal community publishers.

Community Safety Week Theme on the Hedon Blog - Did it work?

COMMUNITY SAFETY was the theme of last week's Hedon Blog postings.
 
The idea was to concentrate on one particular type of article and see if readers found them interesting - or a turn-off!

The week began on Monday 8th February with a post about the benefits of reporting problems in an area via Community Walkabouts.

Tuesday covered the launch of the Not Just Noise website which is aimed at creative young people and sponsored by Humberside Police. The Safer Internet Day initiative also featured on Tuesday. Both these items included videos to watch.

The news that the Environment Agency was to expand its Flood Warning Service was Wednesday's contribution.

Wednesday also saw the Blog post about the timely  Government Training Events on Tackling Anti-Social Behaviour that are taking place over the next few weeks.

The Humberside Police Authority staged its Police and Partners Community Forum in Hedon on Wednesday and this was reported the day after.

The series ended on Saturday with a notice about East Riding Council's publishing of its Emergency Planning Guide "Get ready for the unexpected".

So did you find the series of use? The statistics show that the average daily views were slightly up on the previous week but lower than the week before.

Statistics of course don't tell the whole story. Comments to the website are the lifeblood of any blog - and there was a dearth of comments during last week!

So what are your views on this thematic approach? Could we do other weekly themes? On Health, Community Groups or Leisure for example? Leave a comment and let us know!

New Hedon Blogger site evolution.

ONE OF THE KEY ISSUES facing Hperlocal news gathering websites is making the activity sustainable - i.e. making it pay. This does not necessarily mean making a profit but in my case means not running at a loss!

In the case of the Hedon Blog then I was faced with the most likely prospect of migrating from wordpress.com to the self-hosted wordpress.org. This article .com v .org shows the difference between the two open source alternatives - one crucial difference is that .com does not allow the placing of advertising links on its platform.

Wordpress.org would allow me to run adverts on the Hedon Blog but I would have lost a valuable part of one of the unique selling points of wordpress.com i.e. it's free, fairly easy to use and quick to set up; any community group can quickly set up a blog/website and get their 'voice' online. 

I had originally discounted Blogger as an option because you cannot construct websites with pages as is the case with Wordpress and their standard themes were a bit limiting. However, on closer inspection - and inspired by the Coconut Grove Grapevine - then I have started constructing a Blogger-based alternative. I have used a free-to-use professional theme from Ourblogtemplates.com which allows me to increase the number of columns and offer different options for the placing of adverts. It is early days of construction but the basic outline of the site is available to view here at HU12.net. I have also purchased the domain name hu12.net.

Having built up a community or readers and participants at The Hedon Blog, then any migration to a new site will have to be done carefully and sensitively over a set period of time. Initial thoughts on this are that I would keep the Blog as the community website featuring voluntary and community sector events, meetings and activities. All other news would feature on HU12.

An exciting - but scary - period of development opens up over the next few weeks!

Hedon #hyperlocal blogging is simply active citizenship

MEDIA PROFESSIONALS, journalists and other enthusiasts are debating the benefits of "hyperlocal" web publishing i.e. very local reporting of information and news and citizen journalism. They argue that this is a form of local journalism that points one way towards the future of news broadcasting in the UK and globally.

Media organisations will get bigger in the future and dominate national and international news, but they also need to get smaller and meet the news and information demands of those living, working and trading in neighbourhoods, towns and villages.

The debate will go on and the big media organisations will grapple with making the hyperlocal model sustainable and how to utilise citizen journalism - meanwhile small scale local community websites will continue to bring local issues and events to the attention of local audiences.

Is the Hedon Blog conducting "citizen journalism"? I think not. Enthusiasm for a task - even tempered with experience - can never really compete with professionalism gleaned through training and study. However, where the Hedon Blog can compete is by acquiring and using local knowledge to become an active citizen.

Being an active citizen in the area where you live need not be difficult. Simply, it requires being curious about where you live, a willingness to share your curiosity with others - and a sense of indignation when things do not seem right and fair and a willingness to take action. You need to discover the lines of communication that exist in all communities - both formal and informal - in order to convey your message effectively and have an influence.

My work on the Hedon Blog today consisted of a short shopping trip with camera in hand. In 45 minutes I'd acquired a lot of raw information about my community and material to develop for articles on the blog. The image shows this raw material: Clockwise (left to right):

1. Activities planned for Hedon Methodist Church which can furnish an entry for the 'What's On' page.
2. Landscape work by the local council which involved pruning down some 'popular' trees.
3. Notice of a Police and Communities Forum in the Town Hall.
4. Yorkshire Electricity works on underground cables - what's happening here?
5. Yorkshire Water worksite left flooded and unattended - again what's happening?
6. Possible closure of local convenience shop? Victim of the recession?
   

Each of the above are possible leads for a blog post. With a little bit of digging then stories of interest to my local area can be unearthed.

I'm not sure that a journalist drafted in would be able to see the same potential from my short stroll that I can!?

Hedon Blog Classifieds

I am carrying out a poll over at the Hedon Blog or at the link below about whether people would use a new Classifieds Service. Your help and views would be much appreciated:

Poll: Hedon Blog Classifieds is a good idea!

Hedon Blog: New Year food for thoughts

Following analysing the Hedon Blog's popular posts and my favourites of 2009 then I conclude that I need to maintain a variety of content in 2010 to keep readers coming back. The very local stuff such as the post about the free bus service to the ASDA needs to be married with more nationally searchable material such as the Swine flu article. Of course on the rare occasions when Hedon provides the source of a topical news story, then the Blog can come into its own in providing a useful informative service as with the Amy Black report.

The Hedon Blog is non-party-political. But it is not apolitical as its support for the HOTI campaign shows. Therefore the Blog is perfectly placed for providing a unique local service during the 2010 general election campaign. It can provide a platform for debate and discussion and ensure that the political parties consider Hedon and its interests during their election campaigns. It can report from the 'front-line' of meetings and canvassing. It can even conduct its own straw polls of Hedon opinion and report directly from the count on election night.

During 2010 then I need to look at income generating opportunities, particularly to cover promotional costs. These might come through migrating to a paid-for service over at Wordpress.org or Typepad or setting up a seperate 'white/yellow' pages site for Hedon. I favour the latter, because the winning formula with wordpress.com is the fact that it is free, simple to use, and readily available for any community to use. Indeed even an ex-Editor of newspaper has opted to use the dot.com version in establishing his hyperlocal site The Harbourne Mile! On a personal note then my own income generation needs a kick-start also in 2010 (sic).

A virtual Visitor to #mps09 "My" Public Services 2009

On 26th November I 'virtually' attended the MyPublicServices conference which was organised by the people behind Patient Opinion. I say 'virtually' because I attended not in person but as a visitor via the Conference Twitter chat. I followed the conversation on Twitter and visited the hyperlinks posted by attendees - and joined in where I thought appropriate.

I followed the conference on the Twitter hashtag #mps09. By including this 6-character term in each tweet, it allowed each tweeter to follow the same conversation. TweetDocs are available that record up to 500 tweets on the day at TweetDoc_3 and TweetDoc_4.

The Conference - My observations on the discussion.


The premise of MyPublicServices was to bring together those who are building stuff on the web to improve public services. It was about re-thinking what we mean by "public services". It was about improving on what already exists and inspiring the creation of what doesn't.

"My" public services is currently a bit of a misnomer. The occasions when people refer to "my" and "mine" when talking about public services are very rare. Public services are "the Council's", "the Government's", "the NHS's" or somebody else's. The idea of people being the owners of public services has certainly not caught on in common possessive language let alone in public imagination. But through the course of the day at #mps09 then people dared to think that perhaps it might be possible for people to move on from being the passive recipients of public services, to engaged beneficiaries that could not only choose which services they wished to use, but shape and re-shape them - and actually become the co-creators of new improved services.

Conference participants explained how web technologies and social media could help communicate with and mobilise the experience, knowledge and expertise of the public to create services that would be better and more fit for purpose. This was not a technology issue but a communication issue!

Progress would be slow because of the very 'new-ness' of collaborative web tools. Service providers do not understand where we are with the world wide web. The analogy of the very first iron bridge ever constructed in the UK using yesterday's technology (i.e. wooden style joints) because traditional engineers did not understand the new technology, was used to symbolise the current situation.

Participants gave examples of how frustration - and anger - with the limitations of some existing services had been the prompt that inspired change. The speaker from Channel 4's 4iP initiative coined the phrase of "making trouble in the public interest!" The passion of campaigners for better services has to be channelled into creating innovative solutions to problems. Government and service commissioners need to cultivate that innovation and be prepared to invest in it. This involves risk taking and will involve making mistakes and learning the lessons from these.

Government also needs to adopt the role of nurturing this new web and community enterprise. This is especially the case in the provision of governmental information. Delegates called for Government to "do less" i.e. produce fewer websites itself, and instead make information available for others to use in ways that reach wider audiences, promote participation and allow others to run services. Calling upon Government to do less and "un-invent" its traditional top-down role was a much harder task than inventing new things!

The MyPublicServices Conference is one in a series of events held in 2009 that marks the evolution of Digital Britain as a concept that just might collectively become MY digital Britain! 

Congratulations to the organisers of and participants at #mps09

Other useful links:

MPS: The Evolution of Something... by MyPolice
Social Reporter Interviews at #mps09 by David Wilcox
Can the Internet Transform Public Services? by Julie Walker
myPublicServices by The Dextrous Web
Social Media 'could transform public services' by BBC Technology
Bridge to the Future by Public Strategist
Gift Economies by Amy Sample Ward

Please feel free to post other useful links about the event in the comments below.