Foursquare. Gowalla. And now Facebook Places (although at the moment this is only available if you’re an American). Location apps for mobile phones seem to be the ‘in-thing’ on the web at the moment but is there any use to journalists in them?

Twitter clearly has a use as it can help us to find out where news is breaking, connect with contacts and promote our content. The same goes for Facebook, although that seems most useful for building communities around your fan pages of your media brand.

I recently tried out Foursquare for two months and could find absolutely no use for it. It was buggy and didn’t seem to get on with my laptop. I checked in at a few places and became the mayor of my local swimming pool (yay!) and synced up my account with my Twitter. However, I found it annoying. I often forgot to check in at places or when I checked in I had absolutely nothing interesting to say. Likewise I tried out the screen where my friends were checking-in. Cool. But again no use.

I did put in it where I was reporting from, so I could say ‘Checked In at County Hall’ and then put the message ‘Covering an environmental scrutiny meeting’. But I could just post that on Twitter without bothering with Foursquare? I suppose it might reassure people that as a journalist I’m out of the office scrutinising democratic functions but how many people would really care? Although I never managed to achieve my goal of becoming the ‘Mayor of Cardiff City Hall’.

I could see tabloid journos using it if they ever befriended a celebrity who was using the service. Ordering the papparazi to the Pizza Hut where Charlotte Church was tucking into a vegetable supreme – but how many of us are going to befriend celebrities?

Location services seem more for building on your existing friendship networks rather than finding stories and seem a waste of time from a professional viewpoint for journalists.

The only use I can see for journalists is if they make a personal contact and add them. This allows them to see where the contact is and if the journalist knows where they are they could ask that contact to contribute something to a story – if, and only if, there’s something happening at that location at that exact moment. For example, if I saw a contact of mine was at the Cardiff City Stadium I could ask them to shoot some video of the fans outside the game cheering on Craig Bellamy after his winning goal. This could then turn into user-generated content for the website.

Image credit to nan palmero

So, I’ve left my Foursquare account to stagnate and I’m hoping I’m wrong. Is there a way these location-based services can be useful for journalists? Have you been using them for journalistic purposes? Let me know your views in the comments below.

Got up ridiculously early on Friday 16th July to head up the motorways, with Joni Alexander in tow, to take part in the ScraperWiki Hacks and Hackers event in Liverpool.

Despite feeling as though we’d stumbled into the middle of a Liverpool Daily Post & Echo school outing, we soon found ourselves immersed in trying to use data to tell a story and do something useful with it.

Media organisations have access to, possess and make use of a lot of data. But how much they make use of it, is limited. The Guardian is certainly leading the way with the DataBlog, to give you the numbers behind the headlines but particularly in regional and local journalism there isn’t a lot of spewing out of data. That’s mainly because there just aren’t the resources or the time.

However, we enlisted the help of master programmer Julian Todd, the man behind The Straight Choice, to get us up and running. Our team (me, Julian, Joni and Jo Kelly) had a big interest in local information, so we trawled through the Liverpool Echo’s website in the districts section. Huyton. Toxteth. These are the places where our readers live and what do they care about? With talk of public sector cuts and ‘frontline services’ being protected we thought it would be interesting to show how scraping data could help expose any cuts to ‘frontline services’. So ‘Plod Watch’ was born – complete with a rather rubbish hand drawn logo.

We scraped the data from the Merseyside Police website about PCSOs and PCs. We were able to pull contact information for each officer and a photo of them as well. We then set about attaching the Merseyside Police areas to the Liverpool Echo’s areas. Very different as we discovered.

Eventually we came up with a page that showed all the officers who policed that Liverpool Echo district. Now the clever bit. Everytime Merseyside Police update their website and remove an officer, a big red X will appear across that officer’s face and an email will be sent to the journalist who covers the patch to find out why. Officer promoted? Officer left for better things? Or have the ConDem cuts come swinging their way into a frontline service?

We also scraped the Echo’s website itself to show the story count in a graph for the district. This could then be filtered down to show the story count for crime stories in the Echo website. We could also look at embedding the faces of police officers in the relevant district pages to as a ‘your local police’ widget allowing people to click through directly to their local officers. No more the faceless, car driving, bobby. They’d be on the virtual beat.

The day itself showed some amazing things could be done with data, and showed how when programmers/developers are paired with journalists they can do some great things. It reminded me though that despite all this great data, you still need journalistic minds to interrogate it and find the stories and pick out what’s important to people.

So, keep your eyes peeled as Plod Watch might be coming to a local newspaper website near you.

You can read some great write ups about the day from Alison Gow and Mike Nolan

How do you or would you use data? Have you seen any examples of regional/local websites publishing data? Let me know in the comments below

Image credit to guinavere

However, the stories about a new block of flats or a new air quality management area aren’t always the most exciting. So, how do you spice them up a little? The web allows us to quickly and easily add maps into our stories to give a sense of scale for readers.

Recently Cardiff Council declared a section of a busy road running through the city as an ‘Air Quality Management Area’. This means that the levels of toxic fumes are above the recommended amount. However, this road is a large one and trying to describe the exact area is difficult. Buried away in the documents is a map of the area, but it’s not got local landmarks on it to help people make sense of it.

Embedded below is a quick google map I added to the story to show the area and also the amount of people who live in the affected area. It localises the story, humanises it and adds context. Plus it will hold the attention of the reader on the story page for longer.

View Stephenson Court Air Quality Management Area in a larger map

How to make a google map and embed in your story

1. First of all get hold of the document from the Council, be it the planning application or scrutiny committee report. Find the map. Get it clear in your head where this area is, and if you’re not sure check the boundaries of the area. There’s nothing worse than an incorrect map.

2. Sign up for a Google account. Easy to do, once you have a Google account you can then use their Google map software.

3. Click on Maps in the Google top bar, and then click My Maps. Hit ‘Create new map’ and give it a title e.g. Newport Road Air Quality Management Area and write a short description.

4. You can then create points on the map, markers, and shaded areas or draw lines. The image above shows what’s available to you when creating the map. Think about the best way to display the information you’ve got, if it’s a series of locations you’ll want to use markets. If it’s a new traffic route, you’ll want to draw lines. If it involves zones or areas you’ll want to create shaded areas. Some maps may use all of those tools, for example the Air Quality Management Area includes a shaded area and markers.

5. When adding areas/markets make sure you include a title for each of them and some added information e.g. don’t just put ‘Marker 1′ make sure it says ‘High Cross’ and in the description ‘High Cross will be the main terminal for the new bus station’.

6. Once you’ve added all the information, click the ‘Link’ option and you’ll then be able to get an embed code. This allows you to put the map into your story, so people can see the map while reading the story. When you click the ‘Link’ option you’ll see two bits of code and an option to say ‘Customise’, click this and a screen will pop-up and allow you to edit the size of your map. Plus very importantly where it is centered and the amount of zoom. For council stories the zoom in on maps is likely to be very high, as they relate to a specific area – there’s no point showing the whole of the UK in a google map that’s about a street in Nottingham.

7. Get the code and embed it into the HTML part of your content management system. You may need to ask your technical team for the best way to embed Google Maps, you may need to request it is ‘white listed’ as a widget, or you may be able to access the HTML code for stories. Either way, check with them the best way. Make sure the map is the width of the story – just as if you were putting a photo in. Also, include a title above your map so that if it doesn’t display – people at least understand it’s there. Something like ‘View a map of the new traffic layout for Reading’ and make the ‘view a map’ a link to the Google map itself (you can grab a http://www…. link to the actual map by clicking that ‘Link’ button in the Google map options).

There you go, you’ve added a Google map to your story and helped put it into context for your readers. It’s also a timeless piece of content, so you can re-embed it if you run a similar  or follow-up story.

Here’s some other examples of maps being used in local reporting to good effect: YourPonty does a good planning application round-up map and Blog Preston used a map to show the location of old railway tunnels that run under the city.

Do you use Google Maps as part of your reporting? Got some examples of excellent Google Maps that you’ve seen on news websites? Let me know in the comments below.

I was recently away from work for a few days, some lieu days needed taking (use them or lose them as they say) and the combination of a Bank Holiday and the chance to visit the girlfriend back up in the North of England was too good a chance to miss.

So, I returned to my desk the other day and found an over-flowing inbox, many missed calls, voicemail messages, twitter messages, an RSS reader full to the brim. I felt a bit overwhelmed by it all.

I’m a pretty organised person, I use Remember The Milk for my tasks, I’m good at responding to emails and phone calls and I’m generally good at not forgetting stuff. But how do journalists deal with the information overload? How can we sift through everything when we come back? Especially when your role is as someone in the community that people want to speak to.

This post from Chris Brogan, ‘Your Blog Is Not Your Job‘ made me think, with the advent of social media and easy communication tools – it seems to be becoming even harder for a journalist to take a break.

What tips have you got for coming back off holiday and dealing with the deluge? How do you sift through everything and decide what to do first?

Image credit to dylanroscover

Last month I volunteered at the Machynlleth Comedy Festival. It was the first year it had been held, it was in the middle of nowhere, but it was a cracking idea. Put a load of great comedians in a small Welsh town and let the madness unfold – plus a fair amount of laughter.

I volunteered to help with press & marketing for the event. With it being voluntary, we had people, passion and a bit of time. But zero cash. What could we do? Enter stage right – social media.

Twitter has been invaluable as we were able to build a following relatively quickly, make lists of people involved in the festival and performing at it. Plus use the location based functionality of Twitter to find nearby people who were on the service and might be interested.

The real benefit of Twitter was felt during the event itself. We had the official Mach Comedy Fest account under the stewardship of the brilliant Beth Charlesworth (of A Little Bird Told Me), tweeting updates, changes to event times, photos from events. I was tweeting in with updates from my personal account and we had the hashtag #machfest buzzing with tweets from comedians and fans alike.

So, why bother tweeting during the festival? Surely we were too busy running around like mad people trying to make sure everything was done. Yes, we were running around but also we wanted to show people who hadn’t come, or who on the Friday night were thinking of coming that they were missing out. Twitter allows people to follow and stake out the action – and it might just sway them to dive in and get involved.

Machynlleth Comedy Festival was great, and I’ve no doubt that Twitter helped make it that little bit more social and great.

How have you used Twitter for festivals/events? How did you find it? Did people take to using the hashtag? I’d be interested to know your thoughts in the comments below.

Image credit to Ed Moore

The man on the street. The man on the street right? He wants to know what the candidates are going to do for him. Well, you can go out and talk to 10 people on the street, or you can talk to the man behind the screen.

Plugged in every day at work are thousands of workers, people at home and more on the web in your area – and some of them might want to ask an election candidate a question.

On Blog Preston, the local website I run for Preston, Lancashire, instead of assuming we knew best on what to ask the candidates we put a call for questions out via our website and Twitter.

We got a great response and these questions certainly gave the candidates a tough time. Local people asking local questions on local issues. It was all done via email, so certainly gave candidates time to do their research and consider their opinion – but I think that’s good and gives the reader a better idea of who this person is that they might vote for.

I’d strongly recommend doing this for your hyperlocal blog, source the questions from your audience and drill them direct to your candidates. Democracy in action.

Image credit to Doktorbuk

The next Talk About Local Unconference is fast approaching and I thought I’d jot down a few things I’m hoping to get from the event.

The general election

How can hyperlocal’s cover the general election? We’re looking at running coverage on Blog Preston but with limited resources and candidates not seeming interested in being interviewed – it’s looking like a different task. How are other hyperlocal blogs planning on covering the event itself? Will they be asking people to volunteer? Or linking up with initiatives like The Guardian & The Straight Choice’s partnership? I’d like to think that local candidates would see local blogs as a great opportunity to get their message out to the community.

The big money question

Is anyone making money? How are they making money? It’s the big question for a lot of people as although the local blog might be a labour of love there needs to be a business model of some sort. Providing good, quality, local, content is time consuming and labour intensive. Will advertisers take local blogs seriously? Let’s hope there’s a few people there who can shed some light.

Taking it to the next level

You’ve got the blog up and running, you’re getting traffic, you’ve got contributors. Where next? How do you find more content? How do you expand? Should you expand or keep to your current level? There’s so many questions for those who run hyperlocal and local blogs and have been running them for a while. Keep it as a hobby, try and make money, invest more time.

Getting offline

Are hyperlocal and local blogs running events? What are they doing offline? Are they organising tweet-ups, bloggers meet-ups and other events that get their community together away from the computer screen. I’d like to think they are but let’s see how many are actually doing it and what tips they’ve got.

That’s just three topics. I’m hoping to meet some interesting people and decided I don’t want to run or help run a session this time, but just participate, take some notes and contribute to the discussions that are happening.

You can read my report from the last Talk About Local Unconference in Stoke-on-Trent in October 2009 – it was a very inspiring event – and I hope this event will be just as good.

In early 2010 I moved to Cardiff, Wales. A completely new city, a new country and a new language. Everything was new. My job meant I had to get up to speed on what was happening, know the back story to things and get to know the communities, locations and people that make up the capital of Wales.

This post attempts to explore how the web has changed getting to know about a place. Let’s rewind 20 years and imagine having to do the same thing, uprooting from where you are, trying to find out about somewhere new – what would you have done?

What it would have been like?

The printed word would have been god. I would have got myself a guide book, no doubt filled with useful information but potentially out of date as soon as it’s published. I would have got an A-Z, in fact I own a Cardiff A-Z at the moment and it’s invaluable when I end up getting lost in the mean streets of Ely.

Going on a guided tour of the city, or at least the historical bits of it, would have been a good idea. I might have popped along to the tourist information office, rented books on Cardiff from the library – but nearly everything would have been backwards looking rather than perhaps the here and now.

Of course there would be the local newspapers and these would be able to provide some background information and an insight into current affairs, but to access the archives would have been either a costly (ordering them) or time-intensive exercise (sitting in the local library and reading them).

Very little of this research would be done before arriving in my destination, other than perhaps getting hold of a guidebook and an A-Z. My biggest source of information would be people, through meeting them, asking questions and relying on their memories.

Using the web to get local knowledge faster

Before I even came for a job interview in Cardiff I was able to research it. I was trawling the web for articles about Cardff’s history, looking at Google maps to make sense of where my potential new home would be and looking at flats and houses on property websites. CF10, the dispute over Bute Park and the opening times of the Castle were all at my finger tips. This really is the wonder of the web, accessing all that local information before I even arrived.

However, there were a few extra tools I could use to get that local insight.

The first was Flickr. There is a strong Cardiff group on Flickr and this allowed me to put pictures to places that I was reading about. The best thing about the group is that it often captures unusual places around the city, from interesting angles and this gave me a chance to see a different side to the city. A few times when driving around, or walking along, I’ve sen something and thought “that was on the Cardiff flickr group” and the connection had fizzed in my brain.

Next up was Twitter. It’s like walking into a pub and shouting ‘What’s good to do round here?’ – I did just that via this blog – and got a great response. Now, whenever I have some spare time, or some bored time, I can go and do something. It’s a great list of things to see and do, recommended by local people or people who know their stuff about Cardiff. Not experts, but certainly people who can vouch for things they’ve done and enjoyed. It’s certainly an eclectic mix and it’s a great way of learning what the locals like to do.

Twitter also allows you to make connections with people in the city before you even arrive. These might be informal connections but this makes meeting people easier, and certainly in my case it was great to connect with a few colleagues before even arriving in the office. Opening that conversation with them allowed me to quickly feel at home and crack on with what I needed to do.

Using RSS is a good way of building up your local knowledge. If local blogs or websites offer RSS feeds, subscribe to them. I set up a folder called ‘Cardiff’ in my Google reader and in it I’ve got news feeds from news websites, blogs and loads of other Cardiff websites that keep me abreast of things that are happening in Cardiff. Often I don’t get chance to look at it for a few days, but it’s always great to have a skim through and I’ll pick out two or three good things that I did not know about. The nice thing as well is having a variety of sources, it means I get different viewpoints often on the same issues, helping me to be better informed about issues or things that are happening in the city.

Google maps. Where would we be without it? Lost I reckon. Google maps has been one of the biggest tools I’ve used since moving here. Everything has a postcode and I’ve been able to understand where I am in relation to other parts of the city. I can quickly find routes, find buildings and find things that are near me. It gives me a knowledge of road names, of road numbers and before I even got to Cardiff I had an idea of what was in the North, East, South and West of the city just from Google maps. While an A-Z is handy, Google maps is interactive and allows me to quickly plan my routes.

What else could I be doing?

Some of the offline things I’ve found really useful are:

Visit a local museum. I’m lucky that Cardiff has a rich history but there is nothing like a museum for organising and displaying historical information in an easy to understand way. It gives you a sense of the traditions and values of a place, but gives you an understanding of where the place has come from.

Visit local pubs. The conversations you hear, the notices you see and the characters you meet will soon allow you to get a feel for the city, plus you can get to know the local ales. Never a bad thing.

Join a leisure centre. Even if it’s just for a swim every now and again, or a quick dash in the gym or if you’re more adventurous a spinning class – it will give you the chance to overhear conversations, see local notices (I’ve found Maindy Swimming Pool in Cardiff has a gigantic noticeboard and a huge swathe of leaflets as you come through the front door).

Take a different route home. Instead of hot-footing it, or blasting the accelerator, try going 10 minutes out of the way and take a different route home. You’ll be amazed at what you come across.

Summing up

Above all, there is no substitute for getting off your computer and getting out there. Meeting people, speaking to them and finding out what they think and know is one of the best ways of expanding your knowledge. I’ve heard some great stories already, met more people than I could name and all of that helps you to understand the passions, concerns and interests of the people who live in different communities.

So, the web definitely allows us to accelerate our learning about a place. I have no doubt that in the short time I’ve been in Cardiff I’ve learned a lot more through using the web than I would without it – but is this accelerate knowledge a good thing? Will I just be skimming the surface and not getting enough in-depth knowledge? How long does it take to become a ‘local’?

The idea

There’s often talk of the ‘blogosphere’ and in Wales this is strong. There’s plenty of blogs out there and we’d like to shine a light on the ones that make a huge impact. For all those people who take their message to the world, blogging about what they are passionate about, featuring and telling stories. That’s what blogging is about. Hopefully the blog awards could reward those people who have built an audience, connected with people and crafted their words. Plus it helps to spread a little traffic around.

The categories

Taking different categories we’d like to see people nominate and be nominated. The categories that Manchester use are:

• Best City & Neighbourhood Blog
• Best Personal Blog
• Best New Blog
• Best Writing on a Blog
• Best Arts & Culture Blog
• Blog of the Year

We’d probably add Best Welsh Language Blog as well.

The method

We’d setup a website. You could nominate yourself or nominate blogs that you read. A panel would then go through the long list, come up with a shortlist. There would then be an event, with all nominees invited, and the winners would be unveiled. I guess you’d have to live or work in Wales to be allowed to enter.

So, what do you think? Can you think of blogs that should be nominated? Who would you like to see on the judging panel? What categories have we missed? Any suggestions you’ve got we’d like to hear them. What should the entry rules be?

This post originally appeared on walesonline

What a brilliant section for a website – ‘Gubbins‘. While writing up a travel feature about Lancashire I stumbled across the ‘Gubbins’ section on the Visit Lancashire site.

It pulls together all that random stuff that doesn’t quite fit on your website navigation and groups it all together. It’s got twitter, you tube, podcasts, mobile apps. All that random stuff that makes your website ’social media savvy’ and plonks it together – but doesn’t name it ‘Miscellanous’.

It might not be the most ‘SEO-friendly’ section name, but fuck it, it gives the website character – and too many websites have no character.

A refreshing and great call by whoever decided the navigation of the website. Here’s to the ‘gubbins’ that’s on every website, the random lists, the little bits tucked away and often passed over by search engines.

What would you put in the ‘gubbins’ section of your website?