Author: Nick Booth

B:cen launches Youtube Channel.

Three films which set out how diversity networks are supporting active citizens in Birmingham are the launch videos for the Youtube Channel for the Birmingham Community Empowerment Network. The diversity networks were the subject of quite a strong appeal from the Bishop of Birmingham – who argued on the Grassroots Channel that they should be supported, not allowed to wither.

B:cen (which has employed me on a freelance basis for a good three years) will lose all of it’s funding from November this year, and is now campaigning to try and persuade Birmingham City Council and the Birmingham Strategic Partnership to continue to support the networks (not b:cen as a body) established in neighbourhoods in the city and by groups of shared interest across the city.

Back to the videos, made by another local community film maker Rachel Smith with interviews by Paul Slatter. One is about the Podminions podcast channel which I share purely because I agree with everything they say (and vanity)…

but I think my favourite happens to be Mark on the Disability Network – ‘cos he’s always made compelling arguments for networks as a tool for strengthening communities…

If you want to keep tabs on more films as they are put up, go to the channel page and use the subscribe button to stay up to date.

Bob Piper back Online

With Bob Piper back on line I can now return to barely noticing his thoughts as they drift past on my feedreader. Chicken Yoghurt has the best summary of what has transpired with a list of 190+ bloggers who got aeriated about lawyers silencing bloggers who’d said nothing about their clients. Ministry of Truth is thoughtful and thorough about what this might mean for the UK, blogging and libel laws:

Hosting blogs in United States is a useful workaround but one that is far from being the ideal solution. What would be better would be for Britain’s framework of libel and defamation laws to be brought out much more into line with those of United States of America – and a proper constitutional law guaranteeing freedom of speech would be even better still.

We need to change the law, it’s as simple as that. But the $64,000 question is how?

There is a simple change that could easily be made that would improve things almost immediately by freeing UK-based web hosts from the threat of litigation as nominal publishers of third-party content hosted on their server…

Read the whole post for suggestions on how bloggers might nullify juries in libel cases.The Bondian villain is captured in the cartoon from Ralf Zeigermann.

Upyourend – getting your blogpost on a map of Brum or GEOTAGGING 2

Jon Bounds mentioned his new thingy upyourend on facebook which led me to ask the question how do you geotag a blog post? Jon’s given us this answer.

So decided to get started by geotagging my recent podcast on Clean Medina – the Jihad on Litter in Small Heath. Indeed geotagging is a potentially a powerful tool for neighbourhood news and local blogging. It should also help public bodies keep track on who is sayng what about which neighbourhoods.

I added Geo as a plugin for WordPress (this blog still runs on 1.5 – something Jon and I will probably change soon) which asks for the Longitude and Latitude – and then adds though to your RSS feed. Now how do you find this. It turns out that lat and Long on UK postcodes are protected as the intellectual property of the post office. Jon suggests using something called an API key (which made my head implode). I found that if you tag a location on a google map and then look for directions to that location the latitude and longitude turn up – see the top left hand side of this image of the location for my blog post.

In this case I’ve tagged the post upyerbrum – which should feed through onto upyerend, but if that wasn’t the case upyerend would need to look to your feed – so you need to email Jon and tell him where your bimringham based geotagged feed is.
So there you go. I presume this will soon appear on upyourend. Oh and er will the site allow us to filter by most recent? Yes i know – it’s just something you knocked up at 2am and can I back off with the questions and requests please. Thanks Jon.