The reason I can cite these as a peak with reasonable confidence is that the past two years of niggles around my hip area have now settled down to a consistently annoying pain that is fine to jog around on for 40-50 minutes but no longer, and certainly not at speed.

So here are my personal bests. They are well good and I am properly chuffed with them. As someone who was rubbish at sport at school and effectively did no exercise at all throughout my twenties, I feel proud of these times.

5km – 17:54 – Sandhurst, Gloucester, July 2007

10km – 37:54 – Market Drayton, Shropshire, May 2007

10 miles – 1:07:39 – Walsall, December 2005

Half Marathon – 1:23:21 – Telford, March 2009 (I won money for this one!)

20 miles – 2:17:26 – Bury St. Edmunds, February 2008

Marathon – 3:01:22 – London, April 2008

You can understand how gutting that last time is, knowing I won’t go under 3 hours yet got so close. Ah well, never mind.

Of course running shorter distances, at a slower pace, is actually quite nice. I’ll still try to turn out for my club‘s competitive events from time to time, and, inevitably, I’ll still make some reference to running and the data it generates when I talk about digital/social media stuff in public. As I did last week in a talk in Toledo near Madrid:

The club got subsumed into a more general research afternoon but I use the idea of a book club as part of my teaching on the MA Social Media I lead. This blog post isn’t to theorise the pedagogy of the book club but just to note that it seems to work and usefully indicates to students that discussing texts doesn’t have to just happen in the classroom.

Here’s the blurb given to students on their first week with us:
As part of your reading for this course you are being asked to read all of David Gauntlett’s book called ‘Making is Connecting’ (available from Amazon and in most bookshops).

You will need to read it by 9th November 2011 as this is the date on which you are being asked to organise a book club to discuss the book. This entails meeting in a public place such as a coffee shop and discussing the book amongst yourselves and with any interested members of the public who may wish to participate.

• Choose a venue/time on 9^th November that enables others interested in the article to attend (perhaps a lunchtime or late afternoon. There will be no class this week)
• Create a blog post to advertise the event and identify some initial key questions.
• This is your event for which you are responsible.

And with that the students are on their own (I don’t even attend the event itself). The results this year were particularly pleasing and below are some links to resources created as a result of the event. I may need to think through how I get my distance learners to participate in the event itself but for this year they created excellent short videos to be shown on the day. Many thanks to David Gauntlett, author of our chosen book, for his engagement throughout the build-up to the event.

Videos:
Claire’s video response to the book file
Jeff’s video response to the book file
Isaac’s video

Blog posts:
Isaac’s blog post about the book
Dorota’s blog post on the book club

Pictures:
Dorota’s pictures from the book club

So, here’s Jeff Sage, a full-time distance learner who lives in Canada where he runs a communications consultancy. He’s responding to a task about how/why he might set up a Social Media Surgery in his hometown. It comes on the back of a talk the students had from the fab Nick Booth.

Specifically the task was:

“This week I would like the distance learning students to reflect on the talk by Nick Booth and consider how you might go about setting up a social media surgery in your own town. What would your strategy be? Have a read of Nick Booth’s ‘recipe’ list as a starting point.

Your response should be a short (5-10 mins) video that tells us the following:

• What’s your town like? – rich? poor? digitally deprived??
• Is there a way to connect to voluntary groups and community organisations (an umbrella organisation of some sort)?
• How would you go about connecting to other digitally minded folk to persuade them to help set up a surgery?
• What’s stopping you doing this?”

Enjoy Jeff’s response about London, Ontario:

(BTW, the other D/L students gave terrific responses as well, about Cologne and Geneva, but it’s Jeff’s manner that particularly makes me smile a lot)

We have a distance learning version of the course running for the first time this year, the content for which comes through the university’s virtual learning environment (we use Moodle) but also via a podcast channel. So the video below is also an example of the kind of content that distance learners will get. Sometimes it’ll be bite-sized and recorded from Dave’s lounge; other times it’ll be a longer recording of a lecture given in class.

The video I’m sharing is about a couple of tricky readings I had given the students. One was from Joss Hands, the other, Chris Atton. To support the students I created this short video of me going through a mindmap of the readings. In class we’d had talks from Nick Booth and Noha Atef so at times it tries to relate the concepts in the readings to their talks.

But the main reason to share this is to make it clear that we don’t talk about how to use twitter, we talk about marxism, about cultural studies, about becoming ‘scholarly practitioners‘:

As an aside I got a nice tweet back from one the authors, Joss Hands, when I shared the video with him.

Since the early 2000s the regional strategy for the West Midlands creative economy (as developed by Advantage West Midlands and later Screen West Midlands) has largely emphasised ‘digital’ at the expense of a broader definition of media content creation. Earlier today I thought perhaps we’d backed the wrong horse for all those years, allowing Salford to come along with cheap land and shiny buildings and lure the BBC to their MediaCityUK.

But I’m not here to dwell on that. I actually think some conditions were created that allowed new web entrepreneurs to set up and flourish as well as ensuring more established firms stayed in their city and diversified their offer. I think we did back the right horse but we may have all been thinking of different horses as we tried to collectively articulate Birmingham and the West Midlands’ offer. That is, we never really knew what ‘digital’ meant.

But, as I say, I’m not here to dwell on that. What really got me irritated today is Councillor Mike Whitby, leader of Birmingham City Council, bleating on about Birmingham getting marginalised when he could actually do something to help Birmingham become a thriving centre of digital creativity.

It’s simple, and if he hadn’t side-lined the City’s digital agenda to the completely uninterested Deputy Leader Councillor Tilsley, I think we’d be a lot further down the road than we are. Here’s a message from Tim Berners-Lee to make it clear what I’m asking for:

Bright People do terrific things with Raw Open Data. Yesterday the council launched an Open Data project called Civic Dashboard. Mudlark, a company with bright people, made something useful by cajoling the council to give up their data to make it happen. Some good people within the council helped get that data out. I’m guessing it was a tortuous process to bring it to life; so tortuous that I bet none of them are in a hurry to do it again. But beyond this project there’s nothing. The City’s Open Data page is kind of embarrassing.

So that’s where we need Mr Whitby. While he’s still in office he needs to take the digital agenda under his wing and order his senior people to get with the digital stuff. He needs to re-work the deals he’s done with his private partners such as Capita (who handle Brum’s IT) and get them to stop hugging data.

Now that the aforementioned strategy writers (AWM and SWM) have shut up shop we’re in a bit of a vacuum. But rather than sideline the digital agenda and lament the loss of those BBC production jobs we need to embrace it more than ever.

So let’s write a new strategy. Wearing my ‘Chair of Birmingham Science City’s Digital Theme Group’ hat (I know, it doesn’t actually sound like it means anything but is a group of business-owners, public secotr types and researchers who meet once a quarter to try to get projects off the ground) I’m starting Birmingham’s brand new Digital Manifesto for Growth. Here’s the first line:

1. Stop pissing about and get that data freed up Mr Whitby. Exciting things will happen. Honest.

You lot can write the rest.

So, I thought I’d write a post here to offer some advice on how to keep sane and keep your hyperlocal blog going.

1. You are not a business model
Perhaps the greatest revelation I’ve had is that hyperlocal doesn’t have to be financially sustainable. You may have to finance it (a minor cost if you self-host and buy a domain name), but don’t go worrying about a return. There are many engaged in a debate about the economics of doing this stuff but by and large they’re not talking about you. You didn’t get into this to make money and the debate is distracting you from being…

2. You are a Creative Citizen
I’ve decided that rather than a hobby, running the Bournville blog is part of my ‘practice’. Positioning it this way makes it sound a bit arty and pretentious – that’s a good thing. Putting together words and images is a creative act. Maybe you’re only telling the world about a lost cat but that lost cat article is contributing to a new form of journalistic practice – hyperlocal blogging. Given you don’t have to adhere to the techniques journalists get taught at journalism schools, that you can experiment and test out new ways to use various media, you’re not far off being an artist. At the very least you’re playing a part in a shifting media landscape that’s coming round to your way of working, take pride in that.

3. Making is Connecting
In my review of David Gauntlett’s book, Making is Connecting, I talked about the pleasure of fiddling about with bits of code as I go about making the stuff I publish. Recently I got handed some data from the city council (they didn’t release the data, I had to go ask for it and it slipped out the back door into my hands) from which I created a map that I thought might be useful to residents. It’s not a great map, I’m not a designer, but in creating it I learnt tons of stuff and got useful advice and guidance from others with a bit more map knowledge than myself. And that’s part of the joy of creating. Hyperlocal is not only about the community you blog about but also the communities of interest that you connect to as part of your practice (mappers, photographers, other bloggers).

4. You are not the community
You’re just someone blogging about a particular space, in which there’s no doubt many communities. Stop worrying about representing them, or being their ‘voice’. Imagine all the tiresome meetings you would have to go to to properly represent them – nobody wants to be the kind of person who goes to tiresome meeting all the time. Blog about stuff that comes your way and that you think might attract readers; heck, don’t even worry about attracting readers, it’s not like you have a business model to support (see point 1).

5. Have some children
Or something that keeps you tied to an area. I could equally have put, provocatively, ‘be unambitious’, or ‘have an aged parent close by’. The longevity of your blog is directly connected to your life circumstances. As long as Bournville has good schools I’ll probably stay here. I’m sufficiently lacking in career ambition to not go chasing employment anywhere that would take me away from Birmingham. My ageing Mother lives locally(ish). In short, I’m staying put. And ‘staying put’ is the best chance your blog has got of a long life. Knowing I’m staying put helps me not worry about updating it 10 times a week; I know my hyperlocal blog will be around and part of the media landscape for quite a while to come.

6. Local media is worse at this than you
You think your journalistic prose is bad? Think some interesting local stories have passed you by? Have you not read a local paper lately? By quite some distance you are better at covering local stuff than they are. There are exceptions. On the Bournville blog we did a decent job of covering the Cadbury takeover but now Kraft are in place they tend to feed the PR opportunities only to established media. I quite fancied interviewing Irene Rosenfeld when she finally came to Bournville but despite their PR people knowing I exist they only ever send press releases, and give opportunities, to established media. But really, who cares. There’s bigger fish to fry.

Have been meaning to get these thoughts down for a while – hope they’re useful. I hate to see hyperlocal blogs grinding to a halt so maybe my views (in summary: stop worrying about it, do what you can, you’re amazing) can give you some comfort.

The main one is that I’m curious with BBC embedded videos how long they stay online. I know that sounds a bit doubtful but I instinctively feel that a Youtube embed would always be there (or at least would be there up until the point a copyright owner noticed an infringement and took it down) but the BBC ones I feel might disappear at any moment given how some stuff seems to come and go on iPlayer. So I’ll check back now and again to see if it’s still around. Better than leaving it open in a browser window as it has been for about a month now.

Secondly, it starts with a terrific observation about Facebook user stats.

Thirdly, if you haven’t seen it then it’s funny, as is Stewart Lee. I saw him in Edinburgh last year while he was rehearsing the material for the series this is from and I laughed lots.

It got quite a bit of retweeting by both local goverment workers I know and by social media consultants, so it had a decent enough reach. Despite that I didn’t get a reply other than a couple saying they’d be interested themselves in the data if I found any. Of course that isn’t to say none exists, just people I know didnt have any to hand.

The reason I tweeted was twofold. Firstly I’d been looking at Dan Slee’s presentation that he gave at a national government IT event. Dan quotes quite a few stats around social media use as part of the rationale for using Social Media as part of his professional practice within a local authority. He makes this assertion:

I’m unsure of the source for the figures for facebook but presumably it’s extrapolated from the earlier quoted figure of 26 million facebook users nationally (now at 29.7m). The population of Walsall is 253,499 (2001 census). So whilst a third of the UK population uses Facebook, 88% of people in Walsall seem to use it.

That didn’t seem right.

My second reason for asking for local social media research was because I knew some was about to be completed for the West Midlands. An internal piece of research by Centro was looking at how to plan future media campaigns and how much note they should take of recent digital developments. So the research was to look at the correlation between public transport use and digital technology take-up.

My wife was key in putting the report together and she’s let me have a copy of it (PDF). Before we look at some findings let’s have some caveats although the survey is pretty confident so to speak. 2061 interviews were conducted across the West Midlands, a sample of this size has a margin of error of +/- 2.2% at a 95% confidence level. The data was weighted to each district (of which Walsall was one) so that the same number proportion were surveyed in Walsall as they were in Birmingham. Gender split was even, class split was even (to give it the lingo: ABC1s, well-off folk and C2DEs, poor folk).

• Caveat 1: when you get to the districts the numbers are fairly low. In Walsall the sample was 207.
• Caveat 2: Although the survey was to a quota (it tried to ask the same amount of young people as old people), that quota was for the region as a whole. So it may be that in the districts there’s a slight unevenness across age, gender and class.
• Caveat 3: under 16s weren’t interviewed, they never are in these things.

Oh and you have to see past all the stuff about buses. In summary, young people and old people use buses and in general they are C2DEs. But onward. Here are some findings for the West Midlands Metropolitan County only about Social Media use:

• Of those surveyed, 41% used Facebook weekly or more often, 21% used YouTube and 6% Twitter, 2% MySpace.
• Younger respondents were the most regular users of social networking sites especially Facebook (83%, weekly).
• Few respondents over the age of 44 used social network sites, this was particularly the case for the over 65’s (6%)
• Men slightly outpaced women in all forms of use of the internet, while ABC1 use was more regular than C2DE
• Females (42%, weekly) were slightly more regular Facebook users than males (39%, weekly) while male respondents were more likely than females to use Twitter (7%) and YouTube (25%).

But what about Walsall? That 88% figure? Well the ONS tell us that only 77% of West Midlands folk are internet users (Q1 2011 data .xls file, the stat is buried in table 2) compared to a national average of 82.2%. The Centro district info (caveats above) tells us that for Walsall the figure drops to 66% (poor old Sandwell is a mere 62%). Of that 66% (167,309 people), 54% use Facebook more than once a week. The upshot is, 36% of the entire population of Walsall, about 91,000 people, access Facebook more than once a week.

That’s a lot of people. It’s not 222,00 people, it’s less than half of that, but it’s still a lot. Further, they are predominantly young people. Indeed, across the West Midlands 83% of young people who access the internet use Facebook more than once a week.

So here’s my point. The figures stack up. They’re convincing in their own right and suggest that there’s a generation that is at ease with this technology across a range of devices. For Centro it actually creates a dilemma. Bus users are old and young – both ends of the digital divide. What to do? More cool digital stuff to keep the kids happy and attract more ABC1s out of their cars? What about the OAPs, of whom only 27% have internet access?

Centro’s marketing is now fairly informed. The headline figures used by Walsall seem uninformed – they’re over-extrapolated. And I worry about that. I worry that in local government there’s a tendency to want to create solutions ahead of doing the research. Research can be dull (I’m surprised you’re still reading), but it allows for targeted interventions. I wonder how much the sometimes very  cool social media activities produced within local gov (some listed here) amount to anything more than marketing exercises. Typical of me of course but I’d like to seem a more cautionary, better informed approach. Less of the quick wins, less of the gimmicks and more solutions that target the citizens you need to reach.

I was going to talk about twitter but it’s pretty much a minority activity  (of the 207 people surveyed in Walsall only 23 used and it’s very much for young, male, ABC1s). Also tweetathons and their benefits or otherwise are discussed elsewhere.

Thanks to Mrs H for access to the stats and for making sure I made clear the confidence level of the research but also its caveats – she rocks.

Hang on, I think he means me. Well except for the knitting; I did try it the year before last but it turns out it requires accuracy and patience, two things I’m not good at. I do grow spuds though, on an allotment, a place that Gauntlett uses as a metaphor to explain what Web 2.0 is: “instead of individuals tending their own gardens, they come together to work collaboratively in a shared place” (p5, see also his video of his explanation).

He touches on guerilla gardening (which is actual gardening, not the metaphorical kind) as one example of an activity by which people make stuff and create connections between each other. Knitting is the more developed example and Gauntlett gives us a guide to some interesting literature on the topic and charts the growing interest in DIY culture. I guess the local knitting group Stitches and Hos isn’t untypical of the re-emergence of craft in its combination of a self-consciously hipster rhetoric with a more radical underpinning of reclaiming traditionally male spaces (the pub) and re-appropriation of a pejorative term (see also Stich ‘n’ Bitch).

DIY culture could be a reaction against commercial culture, Gaunlett argues, just as John Ruskin and William Morris railed against industrialism in the 19th century (there’s a chapter devoted to their philosophies). Gauntlett’s key point is to wrestle back the notion of Creativity from being something that concerns the few who somehow have that magical ability to produce works of high art. Everyday creativity is his concern. At this point I was reminded of a presentation I saw (PDF link) by Justin O’Connor which included the line: “‘Creativity’ emerged as key value in ‘positive liberalism’ – active intervention to ensure competitiveness and innovation” – the political economy of ‘creativity’ isn’t the focus of Gauntlett’s book but O’Connor reminds us that in policy, the term is more closely associated with regeneration than the act of making and doing.

Gauntlett has been writing about the web for a long time (Web Studies, 2000) and here he draws on his experience of creating websites in the Web 1.0 era to warn against the way in which many Web 2.0 experiences are locked down in easy-to-use packaged solutions (Apple is particularly guilty he argues). These go against the principles of the web as it was conceived and I enjoyed his discussion of making things on the web, of hand-coding and continual testing. The few blogs I’ve created have all required some messing about with the code and it’s quite pleasurable to fiddle with some CSS (having never formally been taught it) and then watch as the change you were hoping for actually happens.

For a book that talks up the benefits of a Web 2.0 world Gauntlett rightly points out that we shouldn’t presume everything is rosy in the allotment. The threat to net neutrality clearly worries him as it would shift the emphasis to consumption from creativity: “then it will have become an industrial tool, and its positive potential will be destroyed” (p184). His chapter on the literature stacked against the benefits of Web 2.0 largely serves to debunk some of the key concerns but it also served to remind me that I’ve yet to get through Sherry Turkle’s ‘Alone Together’ or Evgeny Morozov’s ‘The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World’. It seems the literature on Web 2.0, judging by the book titles, is diametrically opposed.

Overall this makes for an engaging read (with a very good chapter summing up Social Capital too) and Gauntlett leaves us with some key principles which he offers as tools for “thinking about everyday life, creativity, and media” (p220). Building on these principles he sets out some ‘imagined futures’ as “modest developments” rather than far-fetched scenarios. I liked the one about the future of education where the system recognises that teachers “are no longer just the holders of the ‘answer book’ but are visibly also learning new knowledge and skills in their own lives”. You listening students? I really don’t know the answers.

Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and Knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 by David Gauntlett costs about £11 – £12 in paperback.

Couple of small caveats: I have met David Gauntlett, while he was at Bournemouth University. I was part of a group of academics connected to the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice of which he was part. Also, via twitter he did directly ask me to review this book and I was happy to oblige.

• #mmwd – a set on Flickr – Pics from the Making and Saving Money with Open Data event – thanks to @policyworks
• Making (and saving) money with open data: ideas generation session | Podnosh – Gavin Wray summarises the 'Making and Saving Money with Open Data'.
• Talis Platform Consulting | Making and saving money with data – reflections by Rob at Talis on the 'Making and Saving Money with Open Data' event.
• Official labour market statistics for Greater Birmingham LEP – Stats for the Brum Local Economic Partnership area