Here’s what I did to try and find this out.

1. I looked at all the RSS feeds listed on Chris Taggart‘s Openly Local database of Hyperlocals.
2. I corrected those that weren’t resolving and omitted those pointing to now-dead sites.
3. I took out those that were feeds for a forum as they tend to include lots of ‘stuff for sale’ messages along with their replies (plus, at this stage, I’m not too interested in ‘conversation’).
4. I created an OPML file for the remaining 431 feeds.
5. I created a Google Reader Bundle so that I would then have a single RSS feed.
6. I used ifttt.com to push that feed to a new twitter account @Alllocalnews
7. I counted how many tweets that feed produced. I use a google spreadsheet created by Martin Hawksey (who also gave me the ‘bundle’ advice above) to produce pretty visuals and to archive the tweets.

This is all a bit rough and ready as the Openly Local database is currently being worked on to update it and I know there are other data sources out there.

In the next few weeks I’ll be refining the list of RSS feeds, adding to them where appropriate and most importantly, deciding on a sampling period so the counting can be a bit more accurate (the ‘one every three minutes’ figure comes from the two hours of me watching it this morning – update: see note* below).

My spending time on this is part of a new research project I am part of which looks at ‘Creative Citizenship’. An examination of ‘Hyperlocal’ is one of three strands in the project. Overall the project’s research methods will be more qualitative than quantitative but one of the things we said we’d do initially is get a sense of the scale of Hyperlocal publishing in the UK.

So, roughly, kind of, one every three two minutes. More than I thought there’d be.

About that @Alllocalnews twitter feed. Follow it as your own risk as it just spits out lots of news stories with no location context. However, I like its lack of context as there’s a kind of mystery to it, the link could take you anywhere in the UK.

For more on Hyperlocal read Nesta’s new report, written by Damian Radcliffe.

When I pull my finger out I will get our research website up and running which will then be the home for these kinds of updates.

*Have updated this after spending the day monitoring it. Seems like a lot gets published from lunchtime onwards. 44 stories were published between 1pm and 2pm so the average is adjusted. As I say though, I’ll create a proper sampling period in due course once the data is cleaner.

“After a fiddle and a couple of emails to the helpdesk, it actually worked”

Well that’s kind of true but the fiddling was prolonged at points and although it works it strikes me that lending books out in this way is hardly going to change the world of libraries forever. For the most part I’ll focus on practicalities since the copyright stuff is a bit bonkers to be honest.

So here’s what you need to do to get an ebook (audio books use a separate system) from Birmingham Library Services in the UK. I’ll mention what happens on a computer and on a mobile device such as an iPhone or iPad. I didn’t have a compatible e-reader to test it on. I’ve put all the screen grabs at the bottom of this post, there are links to them against specific step:

STAGE ONE – prep

1. Join the library.
2. Decide if you want to read books on a computer screen or a mobile device.
3. Check if your mobile device is compatible on the overdrive website. Put away your Kindle – those are compatible for US libraries only.
4. So you want to read ebooks on a computer? Download Adobe Digital Editions and sign up for an account with Adobe.com
5. Still on your computer? Okay, open up Adobe Digital Editions (pic) and authorise it with your Adobe account details.
6. Want to read a book on your iPhone or iPad? Download the ‘Overdrive’ app from the app store (pic)
7. Authorise the app with your Adobe account details.

STAGE TWO – getting a book

1. On your computer or on your mobile device (ignore that app for now) point your browser to birmingham-uk.lib.overdrive.com
2. Click on ‘My Account’ and from there enter your library card number (pic). Unusually, your library PIN number is not required.
3. It didn’t work did it. I forgot to tell you, and they forgot to tell you, that you need to omit the last two digits (I’ve raised the issue so hopefully this will change. Now go repeat the above step.
4. Take a look through the available ebooks (pic).
5. Choose a book as long as it is available. Mostly there is only one available copy of each book. If another user has taken it our, it’s out. You can add it to a wish list and you’ll get it when it comes back in. That’s right, it’s just like a normal book (pic)
6. ‘Add to basket’ and ‘Proceed to checkout’.
7. At the ‘Confirm Check Out’ page you will notice that you can only have 3 ebooks out at one time and that the lending period is 21 days (you can return it early but it will auto-return/auto-delete from your device at that end of 21 days).

Images

The conference was very much of a traditional format, it’s almost as if the unconference approach taken by the localgovcamp movement is happening in a parallel universe. The speakers were good and on the 17 minute recording below I speak to (in order):

• Jane Postlethwaite, Social Media Officer, Brighton and Hove City CouncilAlex – NHS London
• Paul Melhuish, Digital News Editor, Department for Business, Innovation & Skills
• Alex Talbott, Communications Officer, NHS London
• Amanda Coleman, Head of Corporate Communications, Greater Manchester Police
• Professor Vlatka Hlupic, Professor of Business and Management, Westminster Business School
• I then speak to a few audience members, two from the UK Border Agency and two from local councils in the south of England.

Hope you find it useful. I always find it interesting to listen to how people are using social media within the workplace.

Copy also on Soundcloud: http://snd.sc/AnE80N

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.