WP Render Blogroll Links allows you to add a simple shortcode to a blog post or page to display a list of links. You can see an example of it in use on Journal Local.

The plugin has a wide range of customisation options including;

• Show/hide category titles
• Include/exclude categories
• Show/hide descriptions
• Customise order of links
• Show descriptions alongside, or below, links
• Add ‘rel’ attributes to links

All of these are detailed in the clear and comprehensive FAQs. You can download the plugin from WordPress.org.

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The printing of that article was not one side of a transaction, nor was it ever going to be. In the comments Ed Walker and Ventnor Blog specifically mentioned payment but as Ed pointed out in a further comment, hyperlocals like ours are set up for many different reasons.

Have no doubt that we are not in it for the money at TLB, not least because there is very little money to be had.

Our main priority is to make sure we are providing a comprehensive, impartial news service to the communities of Lichfield District. Having our stuff printed in the Birmingham Mail isn’t going to be of great benefit in that respect but it does open doors.

And that’s the point.

Let’s be honest – BPM is unlikely to have the money to be dishing out mullah to hyperlocals like us for that kind of coverage, and as I just mentioned we’re not in it for the money so that suits just fine.

…because we’ll get something out of it that’s more beneficial to us. We’re already talking about a whole new area that we can move into on TLB because of the possibilities this collaboration has thrown up.

That’s where the value is. We’re already generating revenue purely because local people have seen and liked what we do and decided to part with their cash for us. That relatively small amount is helping us to survive and have a bit of a comfort blanket.

Our ongoing collaboration will help us to improve our offering and that quality will show through further still and create more revenue opportunities for us that help us to be sustainable.

One more thing…

Ventnor Blog said that our “early actions are possibly setting the die for the future for many more.” To an extent I agree – this will be looked at very closely to see how it works out. However, this should not be seen as a template for the rest of the hyperlocal scene and local media industry to work together apart from the actual conversation.

As Ed said, each hyperlocal is different and so is each local media company. Each partnership has to be treated differently and a middle ground sought between the aims of each party. That’s the bit of our relationship with BPM that should be focused on, not the actual outcomes which are based on many different factors that will not be the same for others.

So today, at Austin Court in Birmingham I had the opportunity to put this question directly to the Prime Minister, David Cameron;

With the Big Society empowering charities, private companies and social enterprises to take on public services what are you going to do to ensure that communities themselves can effectively hold those providers to account?

You can watch the whole questioning session in the video at the bottom, with my question and the PM’s answer at 45:55.

David Cameron takes questions in Birmingham

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the answer, to be honest. I had contemplated adding a bit at the end about Freedom of Information Requests but I decided not to risk pigeon-holing the answer into one area and to see what the PM came up with.

He seemed to say that accountability would come from two places; take up of services and local authority oversight.

Firstly he said that the Government would pay on results and so public service providers would have to get the users to justify the funding suggesting that those providers not doing a good job would lose users and thus funding. The big mental barrier I have with this – and the whole big society idea (which I generally welcome) – is how it works in practice. For example, if Lichfield District Council outsource bin collections to a private company who do a rubbish (’scuse the pun) job where do I go? Will I actually have a choice of who collects my bins without moving outside the area? What if the schools my nephews go to are taken over by a local charity who do a poorer job? My sisters won’t be able to move to another catchment area for a different school so my nephews will be stuck with a lower standard of education because of where they live and no chance to improve their prospects.

The second was more worrying. “Empowering local government” and making sure they have an overseeing role just sounds very thin to me. There was no mention of how local government would actually oversee those providers and ensure they are accountable to the community. More, that didn’t really answer the question because local government is not the local community and I asked how the community can hold providers to account.

I was hoping he’d go further, but he didn’t. I was hoping to hear that the FoI Act would be expanded to include all public service providers, regardless of sector. It wasn’t forthcoming and I’m still left with the same feeling.

That the Big Society sounds like it could really work. Devolving decision making power and making Government less controlling and more supportive. But it doesn’t feel like the implementation of the idea has been thought through, and I get the sense that too little has gone into thinking about the consequences of what the shift in power could really mean.

At least if central Government is more proselytising we know who to shout out if it goes wrong. If power is in the hands of many though, who do we turn to when we need to question that authority?

I’ll be writing to my MP about this to see if he can shed any more light. In the meantime I’d appreciate your thoughts, too.

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If you pick up a copy of the Birmingham Mail today you will see, on page 29, an article about Lichfield’s Fuse Festival that I originally wrote for The Lichfield Blog, and with pictures taken by our resident photographer, Nick Brickett.

This represents the first fruit from what looks like a very healthy tree of collaboration between the hyperlocal site I volunteer for and Britain’s biggest newspaper group. It’s the realisation of my long held vision of how hyperlocal will contribute to the local media industry – what I like to call the ‘news onion‘.

David Higgerson and I lead a #TAL10 panel on collaboration between hyperlocal and regional media.*

Trinity Mirror’s David Higgerson and I led a session at the Talk About Local unconference in Leeds back in April that dealt specifically with collaboration between organisations like ours. We went through ideas for how we could work together, and took many suggestions and comments from the audience. In all I felt it was productive and it helped David and I to move forward with our own collaboration of which today is the culmination.

The details of how this relationship will mature are still undecided but there is certainly more to come and plenty more discussions to be had. That said, the next few months will prove very exciting.

*Photo by the venerable Josh Halliday.

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We did a bit more this year, though. Between us;

• over 2,000 photos
• over 4.5 hours of high-definition video
• 79 tweets from dedicated account, @Fuse_Live
• 25 twitpics

In total we worked for 24 hours, doing 6 hours on Friday, 11 on Saturday and 7 on Sunday. We managed to squeeze in the British Grand Prix and of course the odd pint.

Nick and I showing off our TLB polo-shirts.

It was a pretty big effort and by Sunday we were in the baking heat having had far too little sleep (though the many pints of Weston’s Perry didn’t help) and wishing to be back home in bed.

Still, we pulled it off and although we had a couple of technical glitches (including losing half of that 4.5 hours of video) it was largely a success. Being the way I am it really made me think – if we can make that kind of effort for fun and with last-minute purchases and borrowing of equipment, what could we do if we were paid?

On Saturday we were invited by Formula Ford driver and Burntwood lad, James Tucker, to Rockingham to watch him take part in the championship for his new team, JTR. Obviously that wasn’t enough for us though so we put on our blog gear and while Nick took lots of great photos, I borrowed James’ Twitter account and tweeted his progress on the day. This weekend we’ll be heading down the road to Burntwood Wakes, another music festival and we’ll do a similar job there.

Where it’s within our ‘patch’ we’ll keep doing this for free because we care (though maybe we’ll tone it down for next year’s Fuse) but it strikes me there’s the potential for us to take this kind of reporting out and sell it to people. Festivals of all sorts can be assured of a good buzz and good coverage of their event with such a service (like the Midlands Music Festival which just took place down the road in Tamworth).

James Tucker introduced us to a couple of Lichfield lads who race as well who we could do a similar job for. If we expanded that to all the drivers we could charge them and kill two birds with one stone whilst making it financially viable to continue reporting the Lichfield lads for free.

Just a though, but one that we’re experimenting with and seeing where it takes us….

Also, check out Warren’s great coverage of the Midlands Music Festival.

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In response to a request from West Bromwich East MP, Tom Watson who referenced another West Midlands hyperlocal, The Stirrer, Vaizey said;

…the hon. Gentleman is right to say that we must not lose sight of the fact that there are hundreds of different initiatives that are involved in the delivery of local news.

The last time I mentioned the subject in Parliament, I was e-mailed by the local news bloggers in Lichfield, who met in the pub and now provide an ultra-local news service.

I’m taking that as another sign that we’re doing something good, to be referenced by a Government Minister during a debate on the future of local media.

Encouragingly, Vaizey followed up straight away saying,

Of course, there will be elements of public money available for that kind of research and experimentation.

I’m encouraged by that. Although the coalition has ditched the IFNCs which, according to IFNC-judging panel member Will Perrin, featured a good hyperlocal element, this may mean that the Government might be considering something similar that will be focused on smaller communities than the IFNC regions.

Watch this space!

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This was posted via web from Philip’s posterous

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Anyway, I digress. Martin Cloake referred to that point in his well thought out roundup of news:rewired and an NUJ event. In it, he comes to the conclusion that although big media isn’t going anywhere, content creators themselves (i.e. the journalist/blogger/active citizen) are the ones innovating in journalism. It’s a really good listen so I’ve embedded below for your listening pleasure.

You can also listen on the InPublishing where it was first posted.

Hat tip to Josh Halliday for recognising the reference.

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I won’t regurgitate the details, if you’re reading this you probably know what it’s about. Let’s look at this sensibly;

1. Facebook is a web site – it’s on the World Wide Web, a globally-accessible, publicly-available open network.
2. Your Facebook is protected by a password- that’s all. No secure server, nothing. So it’s not that secure anyway.
3. You accepted the terms & conditions and everything that goes with them.
4. You choose what information you put onto Facebook. Anything that can be seen publicly is as a result of your actions.

Bearing this in mind I find it hard to see why so many people are so up in arms that their ‘data’ is out there.

I will concede that Terms & Conditions are often pretty damn cheeky with lines like “we reserve the right to change these T&Cs without actually telling you” which is, in my opinion, unethical and yes, significant changes should be subject to acceptance of new terms and conditions, just like you have to accept new friend requests.

That shows that the problem is not in what Facebook is doing so much as what it asks you it can do. You give it permission to do what it’s done, then later when it actually happens and you actually realise what the unintended consequences were, you attack Facebook.

Facebook is only to blame for it’s lazy Terms and Conditions. They’re certainly not the first though and won’t be the last.

Thing is, we all know none (or very few) of us actually bother to read the T&Cs and that is no-one’s fault but our own. It’s kinda hard to expect anyone to do that when their privacy policy is reportedly longer than the U.S. constitution. I don’t honestly expect anyone to actually read that.

What I would like to see however is people taking ownership of their actions. Realising that the data is out there because they made the decision to put it out there, rather than being horrified when Facebook changes the way it publishes that data.

Facebook can only do that because you gave it your data in the first place. I only put information on the web that I’m comfortable telling any random stranger on the street. Therefore, I’m not bothered how Facebook uses that information (including making it available to third party apps & web sites) because it’s nothing sensitive.

The bottom line is, take ownership of your data. Don’t give it away if you wouldn’t be willing to tell a stranger, ’cause that’s all Facebook is – a stranger – despite the close relationships you may maintain on the site.

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Let’s face it, they’ll be no LibLab coalition – they just don’t have the electoral mandate. They’d need too much support from nationalists who would soon drop their support when their primary aims comes up. Neither Brown nor Clegg could ethically claim to be PM and putting in David Milliband or Harriet Harman would prompt “unelected PM” outrage.

So we’ll either have a LibCon coalition or a minority Conservative government, the way I see it.

In order to get a LibCon coalition, though some massive concessions need to be made. Cameron and the Conservatives are desperate for power under a majority Government. Nick Clegg who is showing himself to be a man of massive integrity, holds the keys and probably has more bargaining power.

It seems to me the concessions would mostly have to come from the Conservatives and that would not go down well. To the point where the coalition would either be very shaky or not go ahead at all. If such a coalition fell apart we’d see another general election in which both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats would be punished. We’d probably get a majority Labour government with a landslide victory and the LibDems would go back to being nobodys.

I believe that Nick Clegg should go in tough, sticking to his four campaign priorities as non-negotiables. If the Conservatives don’t concede on electoral reform they will have to form a minority. Clegg’s integrity will be intact and he’ll keep the support of his party as well as those who voted for him (and all those who voted tactically to keep the Tories out).

By the next general election (which may follow the collapse of a Conservative government) we could well have electoral reform and Clegg’s action will likely reward him a much greater share of the vote and push him and the Liberal Democrats into opposition, if not Government.

So, don’t do it Nick – stick to your guns, let’s get electoral reform!

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