At the Talk About Local Unconference there was a lot of talk about creating a network of hyperlocal blogs. Talk About Local are doing a superb job of getting people started in blogging for their local community – but what about those people already underway or who have bigger aspirations?

I have learned through working on Blog Preston since January 2009 that there is a real thirst for community content about the place where you live. The local media is fixated on scandal, car crashes and the like and misses the community content. There is a real space and it needs to be filled.

The Talk About Local Unconference has convinced me that Blog Local can work. Our idea is to create a network of local blogs, some of them will be created under the ‘Blog [insert location]‘ brand and we will support these centrally with technical help and guidance on creating good and interesting community content. Others will be established blogs that are already happy with their technical stuff and their content, but would like to opt in to a wider network of local blogs.

We would use the powerful WordPress Multi-user platform to create this network, and be able to create powerful plug-ins for local blogs that deliver relevant local information. One thing we’ve learned from the failure of local media groups at trying to fit standard templates is that it doesn’t work, Blackpool is different to Preston, Preston is different to Harrogate and Harrogate is different to Southampton. Each of them has a different audience the the website for the ‘Blog [insert location]‘ site needs to reflect that and it also needs to take into account the skills of the person updating it. If they are better with a camera than they are with words, it needs to be more of a photojournalism blog. If they can’t take a good picture to save their life, it’s more of a wordy affair but with a design that compensates for this and keeps it interesting.

One of the struggles for anyone running a local blog is content. Not everyone who starts or wants to start up a community blog is a recent journalism graduate or unemployed graduate. They don’t have the legal training, they don’t know how to knock out 250 words into 10 minutes and they don’t often know where to look for stories. Often local blogs wither and die after a few months when they think there’s nothing left to write about. Wrong. There is always information, events, opinion, gossip, news, photos, in your local area – you just need to build a network and tap into it. Blog Local will support its network to do this and to keep producing good content.

Add to this that Blog Local is not-for-profit, so the content is driven by the community and not by shareholders and it creates an interesting concept. Taking the new technology and tools available to create a mix-mash of community blogs across the UK, producing local content and information.

Is there a business model in this? I’m not 100 per cent sure yet but I do know that over the next few months we’re going to be working with some very exciting new people to help create a network of local and community blogs that can help lift the lid on their local communities.

Image credit to Aishihik

Les Cochrane, and me, chatting with Lichfield Blog at Talk About Local 09

Went down to Stoke-on-Trent yesterday for the Talk About Local unconference. It was a gathering of local and hyper-local bloggers, some community activists, people who run community websites and people who run tools that can help community websites.

There was a great mix of people. Immediately I identified a split between people like myself who had some journalism training and were setting up, or have set up, a community blog/website for their area to act as an alternative to the local media. Others had just set it up because they wanted something different.

An unconference is a great format. You arrive, eat some Staffordshire oatcakes (amazing) and put post-its on a board about sessions you’d either like to run or see be run. These sessions are then moved around, some are merged together until a session schedule becomes clear. There’s another board to put post-its about who you would like to meet at the event and another one to put URLs of your site or others you feel are relevant.

I put a post-it up offering to run a session about Blog Preston and Blog Local, explaining how we wanted to expand the Blog Local idea with other blogs. We got mashed into a session about social media surgeries and using social media to empower communities.

The first session of the day I went to was on data. The government’s Director of Digital Engagement, Andrew Stott, had come up from Whitehall to explain how the government is trying to free up public data and make it available. There was a very technical discussion about data formats but the key thing for people running community websites is that this data is searchable, with some basic technical skills, to find content about your local area. So, you might be able to query health data and find out how many hospitals offer a particular service in your area. Priceless, local, information.

The second session saw us team up with Nick Booth (Podnosh) to run a session about social media surgeries and expand on the Tweetup events that I’ve been running with Blog Preston. It was great to see people really interested in replicating what Nick and I had done, but as Nick stressed it’s important that you find the ‘social capital’ in your area. Don’t start from scratch, find people who are blogging, taking photos on flickr, using Facebook, using Ning and on Twitter and get them together. You’ll be amazed at the results.

Over lunch we mingled and I met a fair number of people who were running hyper-local websites, but wanted to be part of something bigger. This is where Blog Local could come in. While Talk About Local is there for support, advice and I think building a knowledge base/community for hyper-local blogging – Blog Local operates on a more local/regional level to run Blog [insert location] and act as an aggregator for some areas to showcase that hyper-local content.

After lunch we attended a session about comment moderation. It was a great session, with the team from WV11 sharing their experiences (after six weeks of operating) about the problems they were having with comments, there was a lot of debate about whether you should allow anonymous comments on your blog – or whether you should enforce a name and email address. We brought the discussion back to whether people felt they were journalists, and therefore wanted to have standards, guideliness etc on their sites, or whether they were community volunteers. My take on it was that we are publishers, if you hit the publish button and put an article on the web you are a publisher – and you have responsibilities and constraints like any other physical publisher. I think that for hyper-local sites to be taken seriously they need to try and ensure quality, not just in their own content, but also in the contents – and anonymous postings won’t give you that. See the Great Internet Dickward Theory for a short but sweet reason why anonymous posting is not a good idea.

The final session of the day was about collaborative journalism, with a bit of Birmingham City Council bashing thrown in for good measure. Tom Steinberg from MySociety did a quick five minutes on useful tools that his sites can offer to hyper-local sites and there is loads of good stuff, so much that it deserves a post of its own on the tools available. Nick Booth then presented Help Me Investigate that I’ve recently joined up to and this is yet another great way of getting content for your hyper-local site. Michael Grimes gave five minutes on the inspiring Birmingham City Council website sagae, and the BCCDIY site that has been built by volunteers and hasn’t cost millions of pounds – and appears to be better than the official site. Sarah Hartley finished off with a quick look at the future of journalism, and it was interesting to see the reaction in the room from people who run hyper-local sites. Are we journalists?

I think we are and all the tools that were outlined in the final session are ways to create content and that’s one of the things journalists do. Anyone running a community website, blog, forum is in a way a journalist. We ask questions, we edit content, we shoot video, we write stuff. We are community journalists and the future of journalism definitely has space for us – because we’ve always been there. In the past, with print, it was the community newsletter but with the onset of web publishing this is changing. It’s so easy to setup a village website and become the dominant media in a hyper-local area and the traditional media can’t do that.

I came away from Talk About Local with a very, very, positive attitude about what we’re planning to do with Blog Local. It was inspiring to meet other people who are hyper-local bloggers and I was pleasantly surprised at how many people had seen Blog Preston and really liked it. Plus when we talked about Blog Local and what we want to do, we found that many were with us.

Thanks to the organisers of Talk About Local 2009. It was a fantastic event and I was really impressed with how smoothly it ran, the quality of the discussions and I’m afraid to say it, I even liked the bit of Stoke-on-Trent that I saw.

See some photos from the Talk About Local unconference

Image credit to Laurence Hardy

It’s Saturday 3rd October 2009 in Stoke-on-Trent, at the University of Staffordshire.

It’s a chance for all those involved in local community journalism/blogging to come together, share their experiences and find out what other people are doing across the UK.

The website states:

The conference is not for you to come and be comatised by web 2.0 marketeers telling you how you can monetize 24/365 relationships or transition viral ROI it is for real people, running real hyperlocal sites to network with people who are doing the same thing.

The thing people say to us most when we are talking about Talk About Local (and you may have noticed we love to talk about it!) is ‘I didn’t know anyone else was doing this’ so we are giving you the chance to meet up with all the other people who you didn’t know were doing the same as you!

The format is going to be Unconference, fun, relaxed and informal. As well and the unconference event, we will be holding social media surgeries where you can come along and speak to friendly developers and experts to get advice about your site or how to fix that niggling problem you just can’t seem to get your head around.

I’ve registered as Blog Preston. It’s free to attend and there’s even some free lunch.