Tag: Video

Stroll Brum and mobile blogging.

feet walker in brum courtesy Pete Ashton

Walkit.com now covers Birmingham. Type in your start and finish places and it tells you the best route for walking. It reveals how far, expected time at different walking paces, how many calories you’ll burn depending on walk speed and even how much co2 you’ll save if you don’t drive. My place to Digbeth in 24 fast paced minutes. All it needs is to add return journey time at “drunk stagger” speed and the service will be complete. GREAT SITE.

In Barcelona, at the Mobile World Congress Nokia has unveiled sat-nav for strollers, with plans so sell 35million GPS phones this (y)ear. Maybe useful when you’re lost – but I’m not keen to wander down the street staring at my phone.

One thing Nokia is learning to do are those oh-so web 2.0 thangs – share and play according to Darren Waters on the BBC’s dot.life blog. Ovi is Nokias upgrade of what was once twango.com. It looks to me more like a proprietary user generated content and attention capture site – that thing we used to call a portal. I may be wrong. Darren says Ovi will allow people to upload up to 100 different file types. So an easily opened portal then.

Nokia does offer single button blog and flickr updates from some phones (although no social features on the website promoting them), but I think I’m still more keen on the iPhone var uri = ‘http://impgb.tradedoubler.com/imp?type(inv)g(17088080)a(1265758)’ + new String (Math.random()).substring (2, 11); document.write(‘‘); approach, which just offers you the web as you know it, and hence the freedom to use the web as you will, rather than Nokia will. Judging from the single comment on this entry it remains tied into specific apps.

However I have still to acquire a decent mobile phone and contract end is approaching, so anyone with experience of the N95 or iPhone for social media please let me know what you think.

Picture Pete, Hat Antonio.

Podcast: The Saint of Street Racing?

Masood Ajaib of Commpact in Washwood Heath

Is there a solution to street racing in Birmingham? Masood Ajaib of the Washwood Heath based community enterprise Commpact thinks there is. He has signed up for an experiment to find a communal way of turning a dangerous Saturday night on Landor Street into a peaceful pastime somewhere safe. Listen here for the conversation or watch here for a sense of the problem:

Birmingham Community Safety Partnership

Digbeth Trust (dead link)

Commpact (dead link)

Podcast – cracking crime in Kingstanding, one fridge at a time.

Kingstanding Neighbourhood Forum Birmingham

There’s an established link between grime and crime, which is why Kingstanding Neighbourhood Forum is using public money to crack crime one fridge at a time. This podcast and the youtube video you can see here or here explain how the forum has been using £10,000 from an experiment called the Neighbourhood Performance Reward Grant.

Run by the Birmingham Community Safety Partnership and the Digbeth Trust, this pilot has just come to an end. The reward is that meeting targets wil release a further £15,000 grant. Sustainable? Credible? Well listen and see what Les Smith and Rita Griffiths make of six months of the experiment.

Also see what’s happening in Sparkbrook.

Podcast : residents controlling the cash in Sparkbrook

A short film and a podcast, all part of a series of four pieces on an experiment on in Birmingham which is allowing residents a more control over how public money is spent. Here you can see and hear Neville Davis of the Sparkbrook Neighbourhood Forum talk about the pro cons and a huge effort they made to clean up rancid sites in their neighbourhood – all with a £10,000 grant from the Birmingham Community Safety Partnership and it’s Neighbourhood Performance reward Grant.

The reward in all of this is that if residents hit targets with the first £10,000 then a further grant of £15,000 is to hand.

The four-neighbourhood pilot is currently being evaluated by the Digbeth Trust.