Sarah Hartley

If you tap into the human need to be consulted you can get some interesting reactions. Here are a few: Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Hunch, Reddit, MetaFilter, YouTube, Twitter, StumbleUpon, About, Quora, Ebay, Yelp, Flickr, IMDB, Amazon.com, Craigslist, GitHub, SourceForge, every messageboard or site with comments, 4Chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica. Plus the entire Open Source movement. If you spend more time on sites like those listed here than you do reading books, watching TV, or visiting sites like ESPN.com or NYTimes.com, then, like me, the web is now your native medium.

Again, the purpose is to focus on stories being missed. And considering the size of newsrooms in some of these communities, plenty of stories up for grabs, through no fault of the staff.

Of the three news gathering organizations and one news aggregator represented on the hypernews panel late last week, only one, the Alternative Press, actually claims to be profitable. And it accomplishes that feat by, among other things, paying its freelance journalists between $25 and $50 per story and using commission-only advertising sales representatives to sell advertising to local merchants.

The Community Information Toolkit will help community leaders like you harness the power of information to advance their goals for a better community.

Taking all the above into account, the Department of Communities and Local Government would like to know what you think about open data and local government. You have until the 14th March to contribute and somewhat unusually, I think, comments on the forum linked above will count as actual comments on the consultation which will be fed back as part of the formal consultation process.

Rvolve is a hyper-local ads system that lets advertisers pinpoint target their adverts to a local audience, and publishers of local content earn from locally relevant deals and services.

Below are 50 of the best data visualizations and tools for creating your own visualizations out there, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter.

Newswaves is a completely free news agency for Hyperlocal blogs. It’s run by three journalism students from Birmingham City University (including myself), and we’ve created Newswaves for our final year dissertation project.

Community engagement is one of my main aims because I feel that many people, who have favoured local newspapers for years, are now not being provided with really relevant content specific to their location. I hope this offers me a chance to do just that.

on March 1st 2011 when we’ll celebrate 20 years of the Manchester Telematics Initiative (as it was called in 1991) when we launched the Manchester Host, the UK’s first public access computer communications and information system, in Manchester Town Hall on March 1st 1991.

Silicon Valley startup, Tackable, allows any organization to post hyper-local news assignments, which users can then search, by location, as eyewitness reports roll in.

Though still in beta, Tackable imagines a social network where users can follow a tailored set of unfolding events in a Facebook-like newsfeed. Co-founder, Luke Stangel, tells Fast Company that location “is the most logical way to organize live information.”

My suspicion is that whoever prepared the research, on-screen graphics and script for that segment of the show wasn’t sufficiently familiar with Twitter to recognise that that there’s a difference between real name and username, and that they had accidentally put offensive words into the mouths of unsuspecting Twitter users.

BIOLAP has developed an application, driven by arcplan technology, that we will provide to Councils free of charge to allow members of the public to analyse expenditure, slice and dice information and drill through to the underlying transactions.

However, behavior change DOES happen in communities of peers – whether online or offline – through a flow of influence. The more complex the desired outcome, the more defined the community needs to be.

The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don't have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings.

The purpose of this experimental task is to combine several kinds of information on a single map, and to explore different procedures to do so. A crucial point is that the layers of information should fit well with each other. I think that combining quantitative and qualitative information, such as data and video, can draw a much more detailed picture of some of the topics a journalist covers.

“There seems to be some long-term, nascent value carried by tweets in addition to the short-term effects. If this is consistently observed, expect a lot more SEO activity around engaging and incenting tweeting to key URLs.

Readers who purchase from a One Pass publisher can access their content on tablets, smartphones and websites using a single sign-on with an email and password. Importantly, the service helps publishers authenticate existing subscribers so that readers don’t have to re-subscribe in order to access their content on new devices.

I measure the success of my blog in the number and quality of the connections I make with people inside and outside the country. I have met with some fascinating Rwandans, from bee keepers to orphans, politicians, diplomats and journalists. It also allows me to connect with foreigners interested in Rwanda.

Voluntary and community sector UK online centre partners are eligible to apply for this funding, plus library authorities, educational organisations, social enterprises and other non-profit organisations. Applications will also be welcomed from new partner organisations based in England, and all applicants must be able to demonstrate a track record of collaboration with other organisations and delivery of community projects.

The latest full year figures for the UK are from 2009. The Internet Advertising Bureau/PwC Adspend study shows that UK search advertising revenue was £2.148 billion in 2009.

Where newspapers still have a massive advantage, however, is many years of trust instilled in the brand. Hopefully, reporters will have worked hard and cultivated numerous contacts with the key people within a community i.e. key stakeholders.

The BBC’s way of writing for the web has always been a template for good web writing, not least because of the BBC’s experience with having to meet similar challenges with Ceefax – the two shared a content management system and journalists writing for the website would see the first few pars of their content cross-published on Ceefax too.

Tips are good, but I’d also like to take this further. How about geo-tagging posts with a foursquare check-in and then feeding the RSS into a Google Map to create a automated story map? Daniel Bentley briefly wrote about the possibility of doing this last year, but I’ve yet to find a plugin or app that allows me to do exactly what I want.

The hack that appeared to draw the most gasps from the assembled journalists in the room, and consequently won, was Articlr, which was presented by Jason Grant. It was a back-end tool for easily monitoring social media and rival coverage of a story in real-time, and then simply dragging-and-dropping elements from external sites into a story package. With a bit of geo-location goodness thrown in.

Others are sitting on the sidelines watching and hoping that at some point they may feel comfortable, or have the relevant rules in place to step into social media. As the hours and days pass all they are doing is missing the opportunities that are there; those opportunities to extend communication and support local neighbourhood officers who are trying to make communities safer. The simple tip is to start it now and not to get left behind.

The revised code outlines seven principles for ensuring council publicity is "lawful, cost effective, objective, even handed and appropriate".

To get you started with social media visualization we created a short list of tools based on simple criteria: they had to run on both PC’s and Macs and they had to be free of charge. While some are more robust than others, all will require you to log-in to Facebook and authenticate the application so that it can pull your data. In countdown fashion, here are our top five picks.

Sales of smartphones – internet-connected phones with browser, email and app abilities – grew 87% in this period, computers by just 3%. That monitor on your desk and the unit underneath is slowly but surely going the way of the cassette and the pager – obsolescence. One last stat: on current trends, three-quarters of all the phones in the UK are set to be smartphones by 2015.

As you will have read, Facebook pages have now updated with a new layout and a bunch of new features that in our opinion really represents a great shift for brand and businesses using Facebook pages as a marketing tool. Read on as we run through the changes…

Obviously it isn’t a realistic option for a small newsroom skint on time and manpower to traipse around all day for ideas that only might pay off. But it did get me thinking that the financial strait-jacket that many poor locals are laced in is slowly hacking at the idea of the ‘roving reporter’, making it difficult to truly capitalise on a connection with the community and to find imaginative content that readers will want to buy week in week out. It made me want to experiment with and revitalise local news in my area.

"The average person isn't interested in the wider area but they are very interested in their immediate locality. If you had a paper for every street, it would sell. You couldn't do that, but you could do it for every town."

I've been thinking about the new Internet bubble for a while: today I saw what, for me, clinched it that the bubble is back. Here, in order, are the six signs that we're in a new net bubble.