Posted on August 27th, 2010 by Nick Booth
Earlier this month Will Perrin wrote a blog post setting out why Local TV probably won’t work and, more importantly, doesn’t need to. He was responding to the government’s announcement of plans to encourage the development of up to 20 new Local TV stations by 2015.
He echoed a huge number of my thoughts on linear media, transmitters/printing presses and local-ness. Will challenged the government’s concentration on Local TV with a series of statements (for Will’s expansion on these visit his blog post here.):
- Why use television as a medium of transmission at all?
- TV is not local
- For small audience local TV there is no need to regulate news in the traditional way.
- The footprint for any of the 80-odd transmitters is orders of magnitude too large for a real big society impact.
- If you start with the internet, instead of TV low cost public service models are apparent.
- Of the hundreds of good local websites in the UK very few regularly use video to tell stories.
- Public service news done in the traditional British broadcast way is too expensive for local TV
There are a number of other thoughts I could add: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Big Society, Big Society Network, hyperlocal, Jeremy Hunt, Richard Stott
Posted in Citizen Journalism, Government, Local Government, Neighbourhoods | 23 Comments »
Posted on August 31st, 2010 by Nick Booth
Here are some of the things I’ve been reading August 31st from 14:24 to 22:49:
Tags: bctblog, bigsociety, birminghamuk, hyperlocal, infographics, linklove, localgov, socialmedia
Posted in Link Love | No Comments »
Posted on August 31st, 2010 by Nick Booth
Nigh on a year ago Kate Cooper walked into a social media surgery here in Birmingham and started talking about a book she was going to publish.
She had, she told me, persuaded 80 or so scientists from the West Midlands to write a few hundred words in response to the question “what makes you optimistic?” Jenny Uglow (the historian who wrote the brilliant story of the Lunar Society: The Lunar Men) had agreed to write the foreword.

At the time I thought oh yeh… Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Birmingham, Jenny Uglow, Kate Cooper, New Optimists
Posted in Third Sector | 4 Comments »
Posted on August 30th, 2010 by Nick Booth
These are my links for August 26th through August 30th:
Tags: audioboo, bctlinks, bigsociety, crowdsourcing, data, heritage, linklove, mapping, mashup, open data, sound, willperrin
Posted in Link Love | No Comments »
Posted on August 26th, 2010 by Nick Booth
These are my links for August 25th through August 26th:
- Open data, democracy and public sector reform – This is an online report based on an MSc Dissertation by Tim Davies submitted to the University of Oxford, July 2010. It is shared using the Digress.it platform which allows for paragraph level commenting and hyperlinking to elements of the document.
- Alchemist dreams | El Pinchen – “how can a person who is doing things outside of the immediate understanding of many, survive and make a living. Make no mistake, this is not some bullshit from an artist in his ivory tower bemoaning the big bad world that doesn’t understand him. This is a new investigation from the person who has launched a thousand “social media” careers. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: linklove, open data
Posted in Link Love | No Comments »