In his post James talks about using Klout for benchmarking:

Okay, what do the numbers really mean? But a number does give you something to improve on. In September last year, with no followers and no one knowing who I was, Klout score gave me some point of reference for how I was doing.

That’s so obvious I don’t know why I didn’t stop to think about it like that before. Oh yeah I know why, because I think worrying about stats is a bit naff. The thing is I’ve only ever really thought about Klout through the auto tweets you see from users about their Klout score, and those frame it as yet another social game. James has reframed this for me as being about specific and personal (or client goals). So benchmarking using Klout could be a handy little thing to use if you’re taking over a corporate Twitter account or some such and want to know that you’re making a difference to it.

Hat-tip to MA Social Media alumni and my go-to SEO guy @firstconversion for sharing the link

Bean jar is a close as Guernsey comes to having a national dish. A relation of cassoulet, it’s very much a (Guernsey) French thing. This is proper folksy peasant food, so if you’re looking for some stick-to-your-ribs goodness and a thrifty recipe to make a few quid last several days it’s a real winner.

I’ve been meaning to make a bean jar for years but I’ve never found the right piece of meat (I’m sure I could have gone and asked, but I never thought to). The other day I saw the very thing – a ham hock – at the Chase Farm Shop in Sutton Coldfield. I bought one, and headed home to get down with my people in the kitchen.

As a folk dish, bean jar recipes have been passed on orally and by demonstration through families, but all basically boil down* to the same thing (even though we like to tell ourselves it’s ‘the family recipe’); as workers’ food you can riff widely on the theme without going to far wrong – the recipe will take whatever ingredients you’ve got, and is more about principles rather than specifics. Let’s go to my Mum’s recipe here by way of an example:

Some beans, not too many, but you want enough. Soak them overnight, put them in the pot with the ham hock and some onion and potato. Cover with water. Don’t put too much, just put enough but you might need to add more later

As I say: it’s about principles. Those principles: beans and meat, slowly cooked. That meat should be on the bone, as I’ve always been told that’s what thickens the stew up. My family always use a ham hock but you can use an uncured trotter, or a piece of beef shin (fancy folk use both). Apparently you can do a veggie version (“some beans, not too many… etc.”) which presumably relies on starches from the beans to thicken up the stew.

This is a great one to cook if you work from home as you cook it really slowly, on a low oven. The story of the dish is that families used to take a crock pot full of beans and a bit of meat to the baker and he’d cook the dishes in his ovens as they cooled. Like I say, folksy.

You do need to soak the beans (and the meat if it’s a salted piece of ham) overnight but then it takes ten minutes to get on, and is ready when the rest of the family comes home. It’s one of those dishes that gets better as leftovers.

It’s also super-cheap: cheap cut of meat (less than £2), and a bowl of dried beans means I put eight portions together for less than £3.

If you need recipes or want some history try this National Trust Guernsey page, Wikipedia entry or BBC article (which discusses veggie options).

If you want to know how I roll:

• Soak these overnight:
• Ham hock
• 250g dried butter beans
• 250g cannellini beans
• A carrot, thinly sliced
• A potato, diced up
• 2 small onions, diced up
• Water
• Bay leaves
• Bouquet garni

I cooked this in an enamel roasting tin. Put the ham in, pack beans and veggies around it, cover water to 1cm above the beans (don’t worry if the meat isn’t covered). Add the herbs. Bring to boil, thrown in oven on Gas Mark 3-4. Do that at 8am. At 5pm, flake the meat off the bone (put it on a plate, discard skin, flake meat, put back). Boom, you’re done.

Next up I’m trying these, if you want some pudding try this.

*pun very much intended.

@toomanydresses @jonhickman Kids TV should reflect real life more often. The episode where Pat joins the picket line…

— Rick W (@DiscoRick84) May 11, 2012

You know, Pat has moved on a lot since I was a kid. Obviously there’s the whole thing where he is married with a kid now (not enough to stop those rumours about him and Ted), but the show has also moved with the times politically.

OK, I’ve not seen Pat on the picket line but the newest Postman Pat series, Special Delivery Service sees Pat face the reality of life in the dying days of the postal service. He now commutes from Greendale to the nearest big town. From here the mail service is run on an industrial scale, and Pat’s job is no longer to be an affable fixture of village life, a constant in a world that is changing too fast, a character and a public servant, but to provide premium delivery services.

Mrs Goggins is moved to the periphery of the mail story (they haven’t yet, as far as I know, closed her post office but surely it must be constantly under threat). This is Postman Pat as delivered by Consignia, it is very much a sign of our times and actually I find it all quite poignant. Pat is now something of a superhero, but like all the best superheroes you feel that behind the mask there is darkness, sadness, tragedy.

I can tell that Pat is afraid for his village, for the community, for Mrs Goggin’s post office, afraid of the very death of the English countryside as its vitality is sucked towards the bright lights of the big towns. But he’s trapped – trapped by a duty to get the mail delivered on time (whatever that may mean now) and trapped by the need to put food on the table for the family he possibly never really wanted.

Perhaps Pat should have gone on that picket line after all when he still had the chance, but it’s too late now and he must muddle through trying to make the best of his new reality.

You may also like: media policy for the under 6s, a beginner’s guide to Zingzillas.

There’s not yet a lot of published academic work on hyperlocal media. The work that’s out there tends to frame hyperlocal as a quest to improve civic dialogue and as a response to changes in media markets (Domingo and Heinonen 2008; Downie Jr. and Schudson 2009; Kurpius et al. 2010; Metzgar et al. 2011; Miel and Faris 2008; Picard 2003; Thurman et al. 2011). The thought runs that media organisations are not serving all communities as well as they could and that new (hyperlocal) activity is needed to fill in the gaps. These accounts tend to see hyperlocal media’s primary purpose as accountability journalism:

“The term ‘hyperlocal’ brings to mind images of engaged citizens storming town halls seeking better governance and better reporting thereof.” (Metzgar et al. 2011)

It is worth noting here that there is little evidence within the literature to support this position, it is simply offered as an ideology of what hyperlocal media does; hyperlocal, we are told, arrives fully formed as accountability journalism and doesn’t need to prove itself through its actions. This is not the case. Hyperlocal media is not radical or investigative by default. Accountability is not inherent in the form or through the act of mediation as hyperlocal.

So if hyperlocal media is not for accountability, then what is it for? Why do people do this thing? And who is doing it? If we take a look at UK hyperlocal media, and the people who produce it, we can quickly uncover a range of motivations, which can be typified through the following practitioner profiles:

• Social media hobbyist: interested in processes of social media production and is using hyperlocal as a vehicle to learn more; also may be something of a “gentleman scholar”.
• Aspiring journalists: an outlet for training in journalistic practice, giving a reason to produce material.
• Unemployed journalists: keeping a hand in, demonstrating skill to potential employers.
• Community minded residents: looking to represent their community.
• Entrepreneurs: they see an opportunity for profit from the activity.

Accountability journalism and activism might be something that any of these types engage with to a greater or lesser extent, but it is really only central to the concerns of the hyperlocal producer who has community as their central guiding principal.

Holding power to account is a possibility of hyperlocal media work, just as it is a possibility in television, radio or newspaper media work; the extent to which that potential is realised depends on the various determinants in play at each and every instance of production, on each and every day, to each and every media producer – it is not what hyperlocal is for, but it is something that hyperlocal allows.

References

DOMINGO, D. & HEINONEN, A. (2008) Weblogs and Journalism: a typology to explore the boundaries. Nordicom Review, Vol 29, pp. 3-15.

DOWNIE JR., L. & SCHUDSON, M. (2009) The reconstruction of American journalism. Columbia Journalism Review [Online]. Available: http://www.cjr.org/reconstruction/the_reconstruction_of_american.php [Accessed 03/01/2012].

KURPIUS, D. D., METZGAR, E. T. & ROWLEY, K. M. (2010) Sustaining Hyperlocal Media. Journalism Studies, Vol 11, No 3, pp. 359-376.

METZGAR, E. T., KURPIUS, D. D. & ROWLEY, K. M. (2011) Defining hyperlocal media: Proposing a framework for discussion. New Media & Society, Vol 13, No 5, pp. 772-787.

MIEL, P. & FARIS, R. (2008) News and information as digital media come of age. [Online]. Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Available: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/pubrelease/mediarepublic/downloads.html [Accessed 25/11/11].

THURMAN, N. J., PASCAL, J.-C. & BRADSHAW, P. (2011) Can Big Media Do ‘Big Society’?: A Critical Case Study of Commercial, Convergent Hyperlocal News [Online]. SSRN. Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1925 [Accessed 23/11/11].

You may or not know this but I’ve been working away for some time on PhD research into hyperlocal media in the UK. That’s harder than it sounds, not because it’s a PhD but because it’s pretty hard to nail down what hyperlocal media is anyway.

There are two places I can go to nail that: academic literature and media commentary (from within and without hyperlocal practice). And you know what? All of those wise heads can’t really agree on what hyperlocal is either.

One of the biggest chunks of academic work that is specifically on hyperlocal (Kurpius et al 2010; Metzgar et al 2011) spends most of its time dealing with media operations that represent entire US state. By comparison, much of the attention within practitioner communities in the UK is on individual placeblogs that might represent just a few streets. The quest for consensus becomes more problematic when you introduce the idea that “hyperlocal” is in fact a way of working rather than a quality of an organisation or a media text (Hartley 2010). So hyperlocal is a big thing and a small thing and a personal thing; it’s a network of stuff, a small activity near you, and just a way of working.

When you’ve spent some time looking at this, you realise that just pinning down the terms is a huge job.

At this point an academic could go one way and try to define all the sub-genres of hyperlocal. That’s tempting, because everyone likes a table with a taxonomy and lots of clever labels (link and citation bait, I’d wager). So I could spend a few years working to justify a table that says things like “Commercial Aggregator — Draws in content from many placeblogs, commercially operated” to describe those hyperlocal operations that work across whole states and countries. That’s one thing I could do.

The other thing I could do is not worry about that, and work with the fuzziness. That’s where my work is pitching right now, and it would be great if you could come and join me in this fuzziness.

What is hyperlocal media to you, the practitioner? Just what is it you’re doing, what are you making and why?

I’ll be pitching to have this conversation at TAL12 tomorrow. If I don’t get through the panel picker at the start, I’ll be buttonholing you at lunch for an interview. And if I don’t get you there, I’ll be asking for you to spout off in the comments below.

References

HARTLEY, S. (2010) 10 Characteristics of hyperlocal [Online]. Available: http://sarahhartley.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/10-characteristics-of-hyperlocal/ [Accessed 9/12/11].

KURPIUS, D. D., METZGAR, E. T. & ROWLEY, K. M. (2010) Sustaining Hyperlocal Media. Journalism Studies, Vol 11, No 3, pp. 359-376.

METZGAR, E. T., KURPIUS, D. D. & ROWLEY, K. M. (2011) Defining hyperlocal media: Proposing a framework for discussion. New Media & Society, Vol 13, No 5, pp. 772-787.

Life moves pretty fast…

One minute everyone is a Social Media Consultant, the next they’re a Hyperlocal Blogger. No sooner do you catch up then you find people are Open Data Advocates and Social Technologists. A Twitter bio can be changed quickly, but the waves of creative destruction and disruptive technology have yet to displace the connective node’s meatspace leave piece – the humble business card.

I’ve been hard at work coming up with a solution to this problem, and now the Zeitgeist Card v1.0 is ready for release. It comes in striking red block colour with crisp Helvetica Neue text and a handy box for you to write in this week’s buzz job title. Contact details? Why the universal language of a Twitter handle is all you need.

Your frand can breathe easily in the ample negative space, and fans of retro kitsch will adore the call back to the famous “hello my name is” sticker.

Here’s an early draft in action – see how I can effortlessly negotiate the digital space by attaching myself to any passing tech agenda. This is bleeding edge future think – here comes everybody and they’re looking at my business cards!

You can download  the zeitgeist artwork in PDF or here’s the InDesign file - you can have it all under CC license. Just don’t forget to change my name and Twitter to yours, you silly moo.

We’ve been fans of Posterous for while at the Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research. It’s been a good tool for teaching, as we can create shared blogs for classes with ease. It’s also been handy for project partners, allowing us to build quick and dirty solutions for them so that they can see our ideas play out quickly.

We were strong advocates for the software, and experimental users of it (way back when, I pointed out to Posterous that they’d actually accidentally built a great podcasting tool and Simon worked with them as a private beta user of themes, amongst other bits of play we did with the platform).

As I say, I’ve been meaning to move for a while because I was starting to lose faith in the software (it had stopped being simple, had started to bloat) and because I was becoming worried that it locked users in too much. By this I mean that when Posterous went hard on a drive to recruit bloggers from other platforms it produced a suite of blog importation tools, but never provided a way out. There’s no back up in Posterous and no easy way to leave. When you’re working with a company that is funded through VC investment and has no clear business plan, these things should always be a worry –  that’s why during the revalidation of the BA (Hons) Media & Communication programme at BCU I’ve introduced the idea that students across our degree specialisms (journalism, PR, new media, photography, TV, radio, music industries and events) should build their personal web presence using web 2.0 tools, but that they should take a considered approach to this, interrogating the institutions in which they are trusting their professional presences.

So I’ve had my escape route planned for some time. Funnily enough one of today’s tasks is “work on blog” – I’ve promised my PhD supervisors that I’ll start writing publicly about my PhD, and as I’ve a PhD tutorial tomorrow I thought I’d better get things in hand (ever the student, eh?).

I’ve just done a dry run transfer of Posterous to self-hosted wordpress. Back last year I’d planned to use the Posterous to WordPress importer plugin, but it hasn’t been updated yet (I bet that’s in progress after yesterday) and doesn’t work with the latest version of WordPress.

This blog post is useful in outlining one way to get content migrated quickly, using wordpress.com as a bridge to a self hosted wordpress site. The import took less than five minutes to clear into wordpress.com, and same again on the transfer to self hosted.

Some things to look out for:

So I’m now waiting for my domain to switch over to my hosting, and this will be my last posterous post. It’s been a fun ride.