Author: Nick Booth

31st August 2010

Things I've spotted August 31st from 14:24 to 22:49

Here are some of the things I’ve been reading August 31st from 14:24 to 22:49:

Facing up to the financial facts | birminghamnewsroom.com – Birmingham City Council's Chief Exec Stephen Hughes: "The truth is, that if we are to protect the public from the consequences of these spending reductions, we need revolutionary change in the way we provide services."
We are going to have to look at ideas that might have seemed inconceivable only a short time ago.
Slices of soup – towards a new definition of local media | ASH-10 – "….the future of online media looks a lot like soup. There will be carrots and they will be important but on the whole it’ll be a murky and opaque and very hard to perceive as anything other than a whole."
The 2010 Social Networking Map / Flowtown (@flowtown) – 2010 map of social media
– ‘Do not sue’ Part II: stories and leads wanted! – an Easy-Waiver (loosely based on what you’d sign to hire a mountain bike, go paintballing etc).
Your guide to organising a street party or fete – Communities and neighbourhoods – Communities and Local Government – "We want to make it easier for you to hold these sorts of local events, without having to plough through mountains of forms and red tape. So we have produced this simple step by step guide to how to hold a community event in your local area. It includes one simple form for you to use to let your local authority know about your plans."

31st August 2010

The New Optimists – "the most exhilarating of books"

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 more

30th August 2010

Stuff I've seen August 26th through to August 30th

These are my links for August 26th through August 30th:

I couldn’t possibly comment: Westminster commercial noise map – experiment with Google Fusion Tables – Will Perrin… "It isn't perfect, but it's easy. If you can use a spreadsheet you can take some real public data and make a map to make a point."
Reflections on the Birmingham Hacks & Hackers Hackday (#hhhbrum) | Online Journalism Blog – Paul Bradhshaw: "a different skill to that normally practised by journalists – we were looking not for stories but for ‘nodes’: links between information such as local authority or area codes, school identifiers, and so on. Finding a story in data is relatively easy when compared to a project like this, and it did remind me more of the investigative process than the way a traditional"newsroom works
Response: The digital era has not made publishers defunct | Comment is free | The Guardian – "The idea that publishers "now appear frozen in the headlights of the onrushing digital revolution" is simply untrue." (Is it?)
UK Sound Map – This is wonderful….. "Join the British Library in creating the first nationwide sound map. Take part by publishing recordings of your surroundings using the free AudioBoo app for iPhone or Android smartphones or a web browser. When uploading soundscape recordings via Audioboo, add the tag 'uksm' and they'll appear on the SoundMap"
Socialreporter | There is no Big Society Big Plan – and that’s no bad thing – There is no Big Society Big Plan, and no-one is in charge.
Unfortunately, in the journalistic sense, it’s not much of story.

27th August 2010

What would you show from Birmingham to demonstrate how the web can do local better than local tv?

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 more