Getgood Guide

A while back Julia Higginbottom asked on Twitter who we thought might be deserving of the hash tag #socialsaturday after their name, i.e. who uses Twitter and online networks to create and arrange very real live social situations from drinks down the pub to more formal gatherings.  These are people I’ve come across (in no particular order) who thoroughly deserve it and why:

Ben Whitehouse (@benjibrum)

As well as always being up for meeting for a pint and/or piece of cake, Ben organises the Birmingham Film Group.  He’s also a regular volunteer at the Social Media Surgeries and joined me and the We Share Stuff crew for a very sociable couple of days at the Digital Inclusion Conference, peaking with his fantastic interview of a protester in Parliament Square, That London.  He’s currently working on an emotional tour of Birmingham and, because he’s so sharing and caring, has asked for our input.  Please give him the back the love he so freely gives out with your suggestions!

Michael Grimes (@citizensheep)

He’s just utterly lovely.  So lovely, in fact, that Pete Ashton saw fit to create We Love Michael Grimes, which the Birmingham crew have been only too happy to contribute to.  Michael sees Twitter as a great social tool that can create and reinforce friendships in the real world, and wrote this incredibly touching post explaining how that’s helped him personally.  He’ll be mortified I’ve written this, just as he is when anyone sings his praises.  It’s one of the things that makes him so utterly lovely.

Shona McQuillan (@graphiquillan)

Shona can’t just organise a piss-up in a brewery, she can organise it at the drop of a hat.  A Stetson hat, that is.  First came WxWM for us Brummies not in the exodus to SXSWi, then came its bouncing baby Moseley Barcamp.  But in between the two, because Shona decided she didn’t have quite enough on her plate organising barcamps and creating beautiful art, is WxWM2: Sue Ellen’s Almighty Hangover.  It will be an almighty hangover if tonight’s tweets are anything to go by.  It’s ten hours away yet but she’s already started on the cider. Go on.

Nikki Pugh (@genzaichi) and Charlie Pinder (@pindec)

Sorry to lump these two together, as I’m sure they do amazing things separately, but they’re here for the fun and games that are BARG and the Birmingham Hack Space (along with Antonio Roberts and Midge).  Come and play!

Nick Booth (@podnosh)

A lovely, sociable guy who shares the love and knowledge with Social Media Surgeries for Birmingham charities and voluntary groups, organising the Brumbloggers into passing on their knowledge on a monthly basis.

Karen Strunks (@karenstrunks)

Getting social on global scale with her magical 4am Project, which had photographers up at that ungodly hour snapping away before, in Birmingham’s case, eating gargantuan breakfasts.  Also responsible for a Twitter Flashmob.  Karen always seems to be thinking up imaginative ideas to get people connecting online together in the real world.

I’m sure I’ve missed people out, please feel free to comment any omissions.  In fact, I’ve just thought of another one:

Me (@getgood)

Being a pale imitation of those above and jumping on the bandwagon by organising an outing to Friction Arts’ Echoes From The Edge this Saturday 31st May at 2pm, which I’ve been to before but am going back for more because I loved it so much.  Please let me know if you’d like to come!

Not a nice experience, this.

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….

Pete Ashton covers Talk About Local – Here’s Ultra Local hero Will Perrin talking about the development of his Kings Cross site and how that spurred him into developing his Talk About Local project, that will enable pretty much anyone who wants to to develop a community blog with training and support from UK Online Centres.  It’s likely Birmingham will be the hub for this, which makes sense as the infrastructure is here, with the social media surgeries and the like.  Very exciting.