Last week was one of a few milestones for me. Here they are then:
We Share Stuff became a limited company. Congratulations!
Digbeth is Good turned 1 year old – Pete Ashton’s response when I told him this was, “Christ, has it only been a year?” Oh yes. And what a year! I celebrated with drinks in The Spotted Dog, which drew a smiling ‘where the hell else?!’ from many.
Moseley Barcamp happened, and was brilliant with, many a debate and great idea springing forth from it.
On Wednesday I started my once-a-week stint at Meshed Media, where I’ll be helping out for 7 weeks. I had a lovely first day, spent mostly writing blog posts for West Midlands Dance. My working flow kept getting interrupted by me realising I was getting paid for blogging, and getting an immense kick out of it. But I managed to get through my task list all the same. (Always so very satisfying, ticking off the items, isn’t it?) So it was a small but very significant milestone for me, and means I can add West Midlands Dance to the ‘Other places to find me list’.
Last week I got a little angry for a couple of reasons. First, Will Perrin linked to an article on Hold The Front Page about hyperlocal news sites, which was full of some quite ignorant comments by the old school of journalism such as:
The only people who read such illiterate ‘local’ online rubbish are the halfwits who spend the wee small hours writing such tosh and railing against the unfairness of life, instead of going out and getting one.
and
…Rather than monkeying about behind a keyboard, wouldn’t they be more use going out and getting real stories rather than allowing matey down the road to continue his feud with Fred the Neighbour in full view of anyone with internet access?
Will rightfully just felt sorry for them but it made me kind of mad. And then Chris Unitt posted the above video of Joanna Geary arguing against some quite astounding statements, and I got even madder.
So I’ve been thinking, Why? Why do these people make me kind of angry? I suppose it’s because they’re talking about me and bloggers like me. And telling anyone who’ll listen that they should form some pretty negative preconceptions about me before so much as reading my work, checking my whereabouts online or talking to me. And that seems sort of unfair – that people who listen to them won’t come to me with an open mind with a sensible amount of natural caution, but with quite a closed one thinking my medium means I’m not to be trusted.
I’m not mad (eccentric yes, mad no). I’m not a liar (too much Catholic guilt for that). Most importantly, I’m Not Stupid. I actually don’t think I’m that unusual in being Not Stupid. A lot of bloggers are Not Stupid enough to realise filling a blog with personal gripes, neighbourhood wars, scurrilous rumours and conjecture makes for a miserable read and isn’t going to get them or their blog very far.
So us local bloggers don’t do that. We tell stories about our community from our own personal perspective, admittedly – I have never made any claim that Digbeth is Good is completely impartial – but by in large we keep things real. And as we go on telling local stories using our own, personalised voices people reading them get to know us, talk to us and hopefully, if we’re doing it right, trust us.
What was most interesting about the video was the opening gambit of, “I don’t trust what I read on a blog. I may do if I know the person, but chances are I won’t know the person.” Er…chances are you will, either online or offline, especially with a hyperlocal blog. People reading the Digbeth is Good blog may then find and befriend over Twitter or Facebook and get to know me that way. Or they’ll meet me in the flesh – I don’t just sit at home ‘monkeying about behind a keyboard’. I go to stuff going on locally – be they Residents’ Association meetings, art launches, festivals or pub crawls (a girl’s gotta drink). I know a surprising amount of my readers and have some sort of personal relationship with a lot of them.
I’m not saying journalists should come to my, or anyone’s blog, blindly trusting it. Neither does Jo – she stresses that journalists should be cautious of all their sources. Just that it would be better for both journalists and bloggers if they came to blogs with an open mind. Because if they don’t , bloggers get tarnished with a rather dirty brush and journalists seriously miss out.
Imagine I went to a party full of strangers but, before entering, resolved to assume everyone within is a twat? If I did that, I probably won’t find out the girl with the nibbles shares my passion for horror films, or that the host shares my morbid sense of humour, or that the guy by the drinks is the man of my dreams. Because I’ll be too busy thinking they’re all twats, I’ll end up leaving early, alone and miserable.
That’s all I ask – for people not to assume I’m a twat before getting to know me or my work. Is that so much?
I’m a massive fan of Radio 4 and I remember hearing a documentary ages ago about prisoners who were given tape recorders so they could tape themselves reading bedtime stories to the children they’d been separated from. It was a lovely project – it improved the prisoners’ literacy and helped them to continue their relationship with their loved ones whilst they were inside.
So it got me to thinking – is there no way they could be allowed to use some social media/networking tools to help with the same ends? I voiced this to Nick Booth, who’s had some experience working with prisons and he told me that prison-based projects should fulfill these aims:
Increase future employability by giving prisoners skills they can use in the workplace.
Reduce prisoners’ inclination to reoffend by reinforcing their connections with the outside world, such as their families.
Both of which social media could help with. Of course there are obvious obstacles, the chief one being how to retain an element of control over prisoners’ use so they don’t abuse it.
I’m sure a lot of people can think of a lot of reasons against this idea and probably think I’m bonkers for so much as suggesting it. But for me, social media is largely about connecting people. Which is the one thing a prisoner can’t do. So if these tools could somehow be used to help them sustain their relationships with loved ones, which means they’ll have a support network when released, and teach them a skillset that could attract employers, it might be worth thinking about how the obvious obstacles could be overcome.
At the last Social Media Surgery I was chatting to the lovely Ged Hughes, who’s done a brilliant job with her Acocks Green Neighbourhood Forum blog – well done Ged! Anyway, she was asking me how to improve a site’s Google ranking and I explained that, as you link and get linked back to and as your online social network grows, you rise up. I then tried to use Digbeth is Good as an example: “You see, if you search for ‘Digbeth’ in Google, Digbeth is Good is the first thing to come up.”
Except it wasn’t the first thing to come up. In fact, it was nowhere to be found. Digbeth is Good had kind of disappeared. It was probably around this time that Ben Whitehouse took this photograph:
A crisis call was shouted across the room to Pete Ashton, who did some online digging. It seemed that searches for ‘digbeth.org’ were okay but if you searched for ‘Digbeth’ or ‘Nicky Getgood’ the site was nowhere to be found. Curiouser and curiouser.
And then he switched the stylesheet off in page view and all became clear. It revealed a load of links in the header to all sorts of disgusting sites. Digbeth is Good had effectively been turned into a lot of links to sexing-type spam.
Things took a bit of fixing – seeing if it was a rogue Wordpress plugin by disabling them all (it wasn’t), getting rid of the links in the template and changing the FTP password, which Pete suspected they’d got into.
So now the spam has gone. But the problem of the Google ranking hasn’t. Seems I’ve been put into the Google naughty corner for my sins and need to do a bit of work to get out of it. Like joining Google webmaster and putting in a ‘reconsideration request’ and other ideas on this film forwarded to me by the thoughtful Andy Mabbett.
I’m pretty annoyed about it. I feel kind of violated (some nasty pervert’s been fiddling with my Digbeth is Good baby) and I have to waste time and energy learning how to do stuff to put it right (I need to join Google Webmaster to put in a Reconsideration Request, and to do that I have to put a verification meta tag into the template header. Erk).
But a lesson’s been learnt. I had no idea that this could happen, I’d never heard of a template being hacked before. So be careful of your passwords and your Wordpress plugins, folks. If the former is too easy, or the latter a nasty Trojan horse, you could end up linking to sites selling cheap, performance-enhancing drugs. Grrrr….
Well, it’s time for my overdue retrospective on the National Digital Inclusion Conference 27-28 April. I was invited to join the We Share Stuff crew in delivering Social Media Surgeries in the exhibition space. So I spent most of Monday talking to people from local authorities, charities and organisations such as The University Of The Third Age about how to use tools like blogging, Facebook and Twitter and how they could benefit their companies.
Monday evening was We Share Stuff’s Fringe event in Westminster Student Union Bar. It was pretty much a social thing, which gave everyone a chance to meet and catch up with each other. I got chatting to the lovely David Wilcox and we had an interesting chat about how local blogs such as Digbeth is Good can sometimes have too much of an author’s personal stamp on them for others to feel comfortable writing within them. A kind of ‘you can live in my house but not move any of my stuff or have add ornaments of your own’ type thing. Which gave me some food for thought.
As the drinks were downed, someone (I unsurprisingly forget who – comment if you remember) came up with the idea that we should take the conference outside of the QE2 Conference Centre and ask people on the London streets what they understood, thought and felt about digital inclusion. I had a whale of a time Flip-filming people’s take on Digital Inclusion with Ben Whitehouse and Stuart Parker. Chatting up strangers in the street is a great hangover cure.
My very favorite was Ben with the protester, who spoke about how online relationships are only truly productive when they’re extensions of real ones. We could have kissed her.
I loved talking to this contractor just outside the QE2 Centre, who had never been on the internet in his life. Despite wanting to and having access to a PC in his home, he just didn’t see the relevance of it in his working or home life to make the time to do it. Whilst his daughter speaks to extended family over Facebook, he prefers to stick to using the phone. Which is totally fair enough – use what you’re comfortable with. But very interesting.
And my third favorite was Gerry the pub landlord, digitally engaged through online gambling. Purely because he was so utterly charming and made some good points about the need to teach people skills in a way they will understand and not get fazed by the jargon and technology.
What was most interesting about the whole exercise was when I asked people what digital inclusion was, they usually didn’t know. But when you asked them if and how they used the internet, a lot of them actually were digitally included to some extent. Which means we are using a term that is not widely understood at the moment. Something that needs fixing, I think.
I asked this question on Twitter a little while back but got no response, so I’ll ask it again with feeling in more than 140 characters.
Digbeth is Good has a Calendar page which is basically an embedded public Google calendar. Although useful for readers, I must admit updating it is a bit of a pain. I basically have to look at a post for an event and create a new calendar entry in Google – inputting the date, time, location and copying and pasting the text and relevant link into the description.
It would be great if, just as I can simply create links posts using the Postalicious plugin, I could post events links to the calendar, somehow inserting the relevant details on the way so it easily feeds into a calendar entry.
Is there any way of doing this? It would save me an awful lot of admin if there were!
It’s time for my very long overdue post about WxWM, brainchild Shona McQuillan’s local alternative to SxSWi. What was most amazing about it was that, within the space of about a week, a BarCamp-style event with back-to-back interesting panels had been organised. My very favourites were:
A necessary reminder that the internet isn’t Narnia and, just like in life, there are mad and bad people out there who may want to do you down. There was an interesting discussion around how some environments (such as YouTube) are more tolerant of this behaviour than others (like Flickr).
I feel that I don’t really make an effort to conceal much about myself or my life when writing on the internet, figuring no-one will be nasty or bothered enough to use the details I give out in a negative way. Some of the stories that came out of this panel were therefore quite frightening – not only how malevolent people can be, but also how ineffective some online communities and the police can be at dealing with it.
The funniest of the panels, not least because of the last-minute editing Jon had to do to protect young, innocent minds. The theory behind the meme is that if you pop something on the internet, people will want to make it have one or all of the essential meme components:
The rude
The weird
The cute
The time this takes to happen – the ‘time to penis’ – is becoming shorter and shorter.
Jon’s parting note was truly inspirational – that we, as the type of people who do Meaning of Briff, are guardians of the rude, odd and weird. We should let memes evolve without fear of our bosses or parents and, above all, BE WEIRD. Oh, alright then, since you insist.
An absolutely lovely talk on how we can tell stories and tall tales online. This has been quite recently demonstrated by Dull Accountant on Twitter, who for a few days had us believing he’d nicked the company credit card for a G20 summit protest bender before admitting it was a well thought out April Fool’s prank. Ben was most interesting when he was talking about Twitter, and how the people we follow and interact with is us reading the stories of each others’ lives. I was horrified when he asked the question: ‘What happens when one of us dies and that character is gone forever?’ A sobering thought.
A local blog for local people
Not a favourite (because that would be horribly big-headed), but my panel talk about the local blogging journey I’ve been on with Digbeth is Good (film narcissistically inserted at the top). The discussion afterwards was interesting, especially when it got around to where things should go next. Peoples’ (very welcome) suggestions prompted John Hickman to ask Whose Blog is it Anyway?
It made me realise that, thus far, Digbeth is Good has had the freedom to grow quite organically. But now there sometimes seems to be an expectation to follow certain types of models, be it a Created in Birmingham style handover or Kings Cross Environment style team building (which I’ve actually come round to and am working on). I suppose John’s post reminded me that, although I can take advice and look at others’ best practice, there is no law that says I have to go down a set path. In fact, Digbeth is Good got interesting for me when I stopped following the hymn sheet and made the blog more of my personal take on the area. So perhaps straying from path is no bad thing, even if I do sometimes get a little lost.
Other interesting points raised were:
Monetising the blog – If anyone has any further advice on this I’d be grateful. One of the biggest obstacles I’ve hit with Digbeth is Good is finding the time to commit to its development. Finding a way of being paid for the time and resources I’m currently giving to it for nothing, without detrimentally affecting the editorial freedom, would be brilliant.
Quality not quantity – Andy Mabbett really struck a chord when he told me he’d rather read one or two good posts a week rather than a daily stream of them. This made me realise I should slow down and concentrate on creating posts with insightful content rather than trying to keep up with everything, which is just impossible.
Phew. It seems that no sooner do I have time to stop and take stock of the first WxWM than the next one is being organised – Moseley Barcamp, part of Mozfest, is on 29th June. There’s also a BrumBarCamp on the cards.
WXWM – The Brummie alternative to SXSW has a great venue and its own web page thanks to organiser-in-chief Shona McQuillan.
On Saturday 14th March, WxWM will take place in the meeting room upstairs at the Kitchen Garden Cafe in Kings Heath. The venue has free wifi, you can purchase food when you’re feeling a bit munchy and, importantly, it’s licensed. I’m particularly pleased about the latter.
We kick off at 3pm, with anyone wanting to come and set up their equipment able to do so from about 2pm. We’ve got the room until 8pm, and will attempt to sabotage Pete Ashton’s Texan experience via Skype at around 7pm. There have already been some fantastic suggestions for panels which I really hope will be firmed up soon, but do keep the ideas coming!
It seems I’ve gone and volunteered to be a panel speaker and live blog at this, which should be interesting.
Anyone who knows me or follows me on me on Twitter will know I’ve been pretty mad busy of late, what with Digbeth is Good and the various projects that are coming off the back of that, so the other week I met with Pete Ashton and put my life onto his huge whiteboard in an attempt to get it into some sort of order. This bit of the mind map made me giggle – does the project called ‘Life’ exist yet? Not right now, it doesn’t. Pete’s answer to this quandry? Why, buy a whiteboard of course, and get all those ideas and little jobs in my head onto a shiny, wipe-clean surface.
Birmingham issues digital challenge – A Birmingham City Council competition for wannabe film-makers and photographers to submit work around the Big City Plan. But it was this part in the article that really caught my eye:
In addition to launching the Digital Challenge, the council has also promoted the Big City Plan via a wide range of social media tools, including Facebook and Twitter.
Communications staff are now looking at ongoing ways to embrace web 2.0 developments in consultation with new media experts across the city.
Heartening news that the Council is looking to embrace and enter into this arena rather than pretend it isn’t there, and are willing to take advice from people who can help them along their way.
