Category: Citizen Journalism

Youtube: messages with your messages.

I was working yesterday with the Northfield Young People’s Forum (no website yet) here in Birmingham, looking at ways they can use online social networking to widen the conversation and attract more interest for what they do.

We explored youtube – citing the number of comments attracted by this Birmingham councillor for his film on graffiti tagging. The group I was working with all saw the possibilities, and highlighted the need to combine being entertaining with making a point.

Johnnie Moore spotted the video below, which shows how one person who is autistic communicates with the world. It is entrancing and intriguing and it part of a series of youtube films made to suport the work of www.autistics.org – a site which is also using second life to make their case.

The key lesson hear is that to be engaging you don’t need to set out to entertain. You do need to be authentic.

Couple this with news that Google is close to releasing a means of earning advertising income from you youtube videos and (ethics of taking advertising as a proviso) being engaging may also help your group raise money online.

Second Life for children

They have barely got their first life started and already children are being offered a second. The BBC has announced plans to create a Second Life style environment where children can play and create and communicate. The beeb says CBBC world will have an emphasis on safety and responsibility with

no chatrooms or facilities for building new parts of the virtual world

Sounds more like a second life half life? Expect more social web announcments from the BBC now the license fee has finally been settled.

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Davos – a few links.

As you probably know a theme of this week’s meeting will be web 2.0 and how it contributes to shifting power relationships. Keep tabs in a number of places including:

BBC: Richard Sambrook and others.

WE Forum Homepage

Davos Conversation

Commondreams usually as an alternative take

Speakers will include Bill Gates, Tony Blair, King Abdullah of Jordan, Angela Merkel, Joe Biden, Rupert Murdoch, Eric Schmidt, Hua Jianmin, John McCain, Mohammed El Baradei, Sergy Brin, Gordon Brown. Apparently Bono will also be there!

The Huffington Post is helping produce Davos conversations and is inviting us all to post our video questions to youtube using the tag davos07.

In the meantime anyone want to step up and have a stab at running their country?

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A civil spat – the Youtube way.

I have masses of blogging to catch up on, but thought I would start with one of our local councillors here in Birmingham who is using youtube to tackle graffiti. In the process Martin Mullaney appears to have sparked an intergenerational brushfire.

On January 5th 2007 this Liberal Democrat Councillor for Moseley and Kings Heath popped up a video in which he talks about specific tags and taggers and tells us that many of these young people are from ‘good homes’ and good schools. 10 days later it has provoked more than 170 (often vociferous) comments, essentially a conversation between the taggers concerned and the councillor.

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As Pete Ashton points out the councillor is clearly determined to confront the taggers. On his own blog we also find out that this particular politician gave police evidence which he says led to the arrest of 3 taggers before Christmas.

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