A lovely dose of self-aware humour “it’s buggered mate” — which I think is an important engagement tool. Not only does it get attention initially, but it starts the “community” of users off with them having a good idea who a site is for — it’s for “them”, and it’s for people who don’t take themselves too seriously. A bit of fun is a very powerful thing.

It contains over 200 records, placed on the map by contributors. Zoom in, or see a detail:

It’s available to buy on my Zazzle store, with my other map-based artworks.

Social media is for most people something you work with, rather than in. Think of it like a pencil — almost everyone can use it in their job, but few work “in pencils”, or even exclusively with them.

It’s an easy thing to use, to make a mark with, and there are huge differences in scale of use; from a shopping list to one of Da Vinci’s etchings. All are completely valid and require different amounts of skill and knowledge in how the pencil works.

When you use a pencil to communicate you’re not really thinking about the pencil, but the message you are communicating. If you’re using it to mark a point to saw on a piece of wood, then it’s internal communication — if it’s a note for the milkman you have to think about how he will react to what you write. That is if you want your gold top in the morning.

If that’s all you need then, great, get to the stationers and get a box of HB — you’re set. If you’re just pencilling for pleasure and have time to practise, have fun (and show us when you’ve finished what you’ve done).

Now stop and think that everyone can get a pencil if they like. And make a mark pretty much anywhere.

How do your marks interact with other marks? And what does that mean to your communication? You need to think about the people you’re communicating with rather than the pencils, or even the marks they make. You may need help thinking about that or deciding what marks to make with your pencils, or where. You might just want tuition to raise you to your own level of pencilling.

That’s where the people that have been thinking about the pencils, the marks and the communication as a whole come in — they do work “in pencils”, in a kind of way.

They may even know the people who put the lead into the pencils if you need to build your own.

The Carpet Salesmen by M R Fletcher

I’m not sure what it means, The Lunar Society is an oft used reference whenever it comes to thinking coming out of Birmingham — but those thinkers thought of science and industry and “made things”. I’m wondering if I need to “make things” too, or is “helping others make things” (a way to think about consultancy work) enough?

Download audio file (1030-sion-simon.mp3)
– Sion Simon MP at Hello Digital

Hyperlocal is the buzzword that being used to describe those new models — “The term “hyperlocal” is sometimes used to refer to news coverage of community-level events.” (Wikipedia). Community in this sense has no real definition — except that it’s assumed to be smaller than the “local” of the traditional news gatherer.

It’s understood that online news sources (those that are extensions of the off-web mechanisms) are struggling in part because people don’t read every page on their website — only the stories that interest them. The phrase in the US is “print dollars become online dimes” (or somesuch) — the same content (and a potentially wider audience for each piece) doesn’t generate the same revenues. This is because it’s possible to split, target and assess those eyeballs and click-throughs.

Extend that into the “local arena” and there’s less room for the niche — it’s not feasible at all to suggest that advertising can pay to generate  truly niche content. A stark contrast with niche but non-geographic interests, which can find a audience online that outstrips any a conventionally distributed source can provide.

A quick and dirty example: It’s no good saying that an announcement of (say) a new ukulele group in a suburb is of interest to all in that suburb — it isn’t — and as filtering gets better that information will only reach those that care enough and are local enough. At that level even a specialist shop won’t pay enough to gather than information.

It wouldn’t work in a current (read historical) “local” news source — unless as a little bit of human interest filler, and it wasn’t that item that was attracting the advertisers — it was a place in the whole “package”, which soon will no longer exist.

But there are people and companies that still want to do the local news gathering — why? There are a few competing (or complimentary) models emerging — here’s one way I think we can divide them:

• the very local, volunteer run (one or two people) blog (often no ads, or a trickle of Google ad money — but no real desire to make money)
• the local blog that runs (sort of) like a small newspaper (ads are often sold direct to local business in the same way as a newspaper)
• the network — where sub-sites for areas are created (the ads are sold centrally, the object is to keep the overall site running rather than the sub-sites)
• the aggregator — where content is electronically pulled from various social (or news) spaces — (ads sold by the aggregator for the aggregator)

All but the volunteer-led source are facing the exact same problem as the “traditional operators” — a fight between scale of operation and potential income. The local blog “newspaper” has more flexibility and less costs than the traditional operator and can work on much tighter margins, but it still has to balance between area covered and effort expended. What the two “ground-up” models have as an advantage is that they can feel the size of the area for themselves from experience, they are covering an area that makes sense to them. This might not be at a level that can attract enough advertisements (Philip John is encouraged by the take-up on The Lichfield Blog, but it can’t be paying for much above server costs — will it eventually? I have no idea). What the networks and the aggregators seem to be doing is picking a size that they can sell advertisements too and making that the area on which they focus.

I did a very quick, small and unscientific survey on Twitter asking people what sort of area felt “local” to them — with these results. People had very different ideas of “local” — a road with 35 people, to a country with 4,500,000. Even those picking the same definition (eg my suburb) had wide ideas of what size that was. This isn’t surprising — and many people (rightly) said things to the effect that “my local airport is further away than my local shop” and “it depends”.

Without some system of “soviets” — a network of ultra local sites, each feeding upwards and having new input at each level of scale — there’s no way that one news source (or type of news source) can cover all of the news needs of each people. What’s happened in the past is that the “distribution” scale featured it’s own level and a pick’n'mix of that below — people understandably felt that wasn’t serving them well and have started to create outlets at different scale. These so far have worked in tandem with existing outlets — so aren’t really equipped to replace them.

The worrying (for some) is that the “distribution” scale corresponded roughly with that of legislature (although not a good fit always) — so that’s a gap that is less obviously well filled. Pits’n'Pots – for example – does a great job at the level of Stoke’s Council, but what independent outlet is operating at the scale of regional development agency? Is there anyone that can hold AWM to account (although one might argue that few do anyway)?

It’s my contention that different types of sites will plug these gaps — I could see a “what are they up to” site run for most legislative bodies or quangos, or different sites sharing resources to hold bodies to account. Support networks, collaboration will be what’s needed. There are some businesses there (tech support, local ad sales perhaps), but it’s not huge profits — and there aren’t certainly for content creators.

It’s lucky, therefore, that most content creators are doing it out of duty or love.

We’re in a period of transition — we know that no-one source is enough, but the don’t yet have the methods to pick the bits from separate sources. Aggregation tools as they stand aren’t the answer, and it’s difficult for people to be brave enough to “trust the network” as we have to.

It’ll come, it’s coming — but we’re not there yet — exciting isn’t it?

But first the “bad news”, see the decline in regional newspaper circulation from 1993 (as shown in a very impressive set of slides from Douglas McCabe of Enders Analysis)

What strikes me is that, while the decline starts to happen consistently with widespread internet adoption, there are huge drops in years before that, including 1993; before the world wide web. Something was up with what the regional press was offering long before people started getting news online —  and local news online provision lagged behind that of national (certainly in Birmingham where it’s only been about a year since the local papers started to publish properly on the web).

I have a little suspicion that it’s the era of spin that may have turned people off — but that’s just conjecture — what’s more obvious (and was generally agreed on in discussions) is that it’s not just the news provision that people find online. The community building, organising, communication, advertising (classifieds) have all moved online to better platforms — ones that newspapers don’t own.

That perhaps explains the difference in time spent reading a newspaper as opposed to looking at news online:

Although I’m not sure how the “30 minutes” is calculated — it seems a little too much like asking people and them replying with “ooh about half an hour”. The problem with measuring offline activity against online is that the online can be measured hugely accurately, offline not quite so much.

It does paint a picture that suggests that advertising won’t in any way support news online in the way it has in newspapers, which I think we all knew — but the figures present a very depressing picture for local press in particular.

So, what would we lose if we lost the regional press? One oft mentioned example is the loss of a regional “fourth estate” — to hold councils et al to account, another a loss of investigative journalism. Just how much council coverage, and how much investigative work is done is open to debate (and there are even a few attempt to measure it).

There’s no doubt that these things can be done online, whether by what we’d now understand as journalists, by other people working alone or by groups collaborating (maybe on sites such as Help Me Investigate —disclosure, I’ve worked wtih HMI). There’s also no doubt that that can be made easier by Government (Local & National) transparency and access to data. Streaming (and archiving online) council meetings would be a huge boon to the local blogger. Imagine this including your local government.

I think it’s re-enforce my thoughts that the hole left my newspapers probably wouldn’t be newspaper shaped, or needing to be filled by just one thing. People have been plugging gaps already, and (most of) the papers are still here.

What’s taking newspaper’s place

This is some of the really interesting stuff,  I learnt a huge amount about the different types of companies that are attempting to make the local (or hyperlocal — a word I’m not convinced about) space pay. The US is way ahead of the UK on the development of these sites, it seems. They differ in method, but all really do one thing — get local people to tell the news, and sell advertising around it. Some edit, some profit share, some build discussion — but all use templates to build sites that talk about a specific area.

For me the issue here is that community size is too fluid, and that geographical area is a poor indication of the “right” size  of area to cover. It’s something that the templated/networked sites can really struggle with — most seem to default on city or town (20-50,000 people were figures quoted, I’m not sure this qualifies as local or hyperlocal) possibly because that’s the size at which advertising becomes viable. While there’s no reason that a site about Birmingham (such as mine) and a site about Digbeth (a neighbourhood within it) can’t co-exist — but it would be difficult to see how they can chase the same ad revenue (possibly Digbeth is even too small to generate enough views, I’m not sure). Only the community knows how they see a place, what feels local to them.

To a certain extent that isn’t a problem for self-produced sites, I don’t attempt to cover anything but hosting costs (and if the site uses something like Wordpress.com, Ning or Tumblr then there need be no hosting costs at all) — and I don’t have to make money. The local blogger using a local blog network doesn’t have to get ads, but the network owners do.

I’m sure that there’s a place — and a business model for all sorts of of ways to do this. More likely we’ll see geo-search and something approaching geo-attention build custom offerings for each user pulling information from all of these types of sites together. What’s not clear is that there’s much (beyond opening up as much geo-located data, postcodes etc) that government can to to help that.

Attention to the UK’s libel laws, and more work on digital inclusion can help every UK blogger (or citizen) — not just those involved in local news — but if we need an impetus to work on it…

Paul Bradshaw has a much better grasp of the problems and possible solutions.

What should/shouldn’t Government do

At the end of the session we were asked to put post-it’s on two flip charts — one for what we’d like the Government to do, one for what they certainly shouldn’t. Like all that was said it’s public but unattributable — Will Perrin has blogged the complete list transcribed.

Why the official consultation can't be written in Plain English I don't know, but this is a step in — sort of — the right direction. [link]

I’m rather proud that we’ve developed — what we believe to be — the first accredited course in understanding and using social media. It’s completely platform agnostic — and designed to work with the appropriate tools for the interests and motivation of whoever’s learning, teaching the concepts of the social web rather than the tools.

Why not the tools? Well, here’s a lovingly extended metaphor I wrote for a talk Stu Parker gave at the WMRO Conference today:

Learning to use technology is like learning to drive — the rules, the highway code, being safe and not hurting yourself or others, are more the focus than what each control does. Not that learning to drive isn’t learning to use the controls, it is, but it’s only a start. Your teacher, your mum, your dad or a paid-for-instructor will focus on what’s happening around you rather than learning by rote what pedal to press when. Once you’ve mastered the gear change, it’s all about observation and reaction.

Think about what happens when you get into a different car to drive it, you might spend a little bit of time getting comfortable in the seat, working out on which stalk the lights are, reading the manual to make sure the radio doesn’t keep flicking to Saga FM — but in a few seconds, because the controls are basically the same (and the rules of the road are exactly the same – unless you’re one of those people that think porsches are allowed to park on double yellows) you’re off.

And this is what real technological inclusion is. It’s the confidence to move from one technology to another, to be confident that you know enough to make sure you’re safe — that there isn’t going to be a crash. We don’t spend time and effort teaching people to drive a Renault Clio, only for them to be foxed by a Fiat Punto. And we shouldn’t teach people Word or Excel only for another word processor or spreadsheet to stump them — or in the case of Microsoft Office a simple upgrade.

And so digital inclusion is platform agnostic, we need to define it as a confidence. You may well need help to get you to the basic level — to pass your test to continue the driving analogy — but it’s then that you can really start using the ‘net or any other technology you want to. And it’s then that you can do it without thinking about the buttons, wheels, pedals, but concentrating on your destination, reacting to others. It’s then that you can rush down the motorway to work, or take a casual meandering drive around pleasant country lanes, Linked In or Cute Overload — you can go where you like.

Here’s a simplified view of traditional network, from the point of view of the red dot:

From your point of view you’re surrounded by your group (they have different an overlapping groups themselves). In offline society the theory holds well, you have relationships with people and they reciprocate (you may care more, or invest more in the relationship — you’re closer or further from the centre of their circle than they are in yours — but you’re both in each other’s group). This extends well onto social networking sites where “friendship” is a reciprocal arrangement:

Conversely as far as your expectations may go the online grouping is likely to be the smaller one, there are people you know who you don’t connect with offline. Trying to represent this here is the solid blue (both on and offline contacts), with whom your communication is obviously most connected.

Online however we see groups forming where the isn’t reciprocal “friendship”. Within a Twitter network you can have people within your group that don’t have a group containing you — and this can have within it people that you connect with offline only that follow your online activities.

But — and here’s the main way that online communication is changing grouping and networks online — you can exist simultaneously in a great number of these groupings. Moving within them, paying more or less attention as your mood or activities require.

These groups overlap, some almost completely, some not much, all are flexible and have flow to and from at any one point. Groups can quickly appear, disappear,and change size and composition rapidly.

You still may only be able to maintain a Dunbar number of relationships, but the free flow allows you to “place relationships on hold” (not breaking the ties, just not using them for a time)— vastly expanding the number of connections, while not weakening any one individually.