uncategorized - Jon Hickman

The Contributoria Tapes: A great fresh tax for your local coffee making indy?

This piece was originally published on Contributoria — find out what that means and why it is posted here by reading this note. Article background For my second Contributoria piece I ignored the editorial theme about the future because I don’t do futurology (though I might, in the future, you can’t

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The sudden but not unexpected death of Contributoria

The journalism project Contributoria has announced that it has published its last issue this month. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the site would close, but the pace of the closure did catch me off guard. I’ve written for the site several times as I was interested in the mechanics of its crowdfundi

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Veg, part 2

So, I have an allotment now. It’s on White Farm Road, which is near the house. The Four Oaks Allotments are on a split site with the other plots around the corner on Four Oaks Common Road. We have our own social club with a club house that people can hire for things. It’s all pretty sweet. SHARE T

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Twitter / Profile / REF / Engagement

I’m filling out a form that is being used to capture some information for our REF narrative. Part of that is about my online profile, and part of that asks me to describe how I use Twitter. So this has all led me to distil a few things that I’ve always said about Twitter as follows: I am… Continue r

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Cameras are obvious, the web is still scary

It’s Freshers’ Week again. Today we had to ‘pitch’ our first year production modules to the new intake so they can make an informed choice about what they are studying this year. This afternoon I’ve been meeting students in a drop-in session at my office to answer queries about the classes I run. I’

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Hyperlocal: is just being there enough?

Location is a key component of what makes a hyperlocal blog a hyperlocal blog – the clue is in the term hyperlocal. The scale of what a hyperlocale is shifts around a lot as you read different academic and practitioner accounts, but that sense of place is very important. Other factors seem to matter

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Hashtags are like blue hats

If I were to study football culture by observing, exhaustively, everything done by someone in a blue hat because they were the first football fan I’d ever seen I’d miss all the things being done by the blue scarves, the blue shirts… and the red everything else. I found this on the first page of… Con

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Wolverhampton is really good at television

The announcement of Wolverhampton’s Portas Pilot win does rather indicate that the scheme is shaped more by telly than by a serious attempt at regeneration. SHARE THIS: * Share * * Twitter [https://theplan.co.uk/wolverhampton-is-really-good-at-television/?share=twitter] * Email [https

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Twitter fanfic as ‘Improvised Fan Simulation’

I just wanted to share a nugget from one of the articles Inger-Lise and I are producing from our research on fans who tweet as characters from The West Wing. One of the key discussions we had throughout the project was around defining the activity: is it role play? Fan fic? Something else? The term…

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Oh right so that is what Klout is for

I’ve never really got the appeal of Klout because I’ve always tended to think it was a bit naff to go around fretting about your “stats” on social media like that was in any way meaningful. Thanks to this blog post by James Carson I can now see how it could be useful. In his post… Continue reading O

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Postman Pat and the slow death of the postal service

A quick post in response to a conversation on Twitter today: https://twitter.com/#!/discorick84/status/200854243933032448 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

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Introducing… The Zeitgeist Card

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

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Cheerio Posterous – a timely move and a how to

The announcement yesterday that Posterous has been sold to Twitter reminded me that I’ve been meaning to move my blog for sometime (apparently since last March, so my bookmarks tell me). We’ve been fans of Posterous for while at the Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research. It’s been a good t

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The anecdote where I have to download Doctor Who from a grey market source

There’s an Oatmeal comic doing the rounds today about how hard it can be to actually pay for media content. The basic message is that although there is a wide range of places consumers can go to pay for media content (in this case a TV programme) it can actually be really hard to pay for the… Contin

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Next week’s twitter – now!

Just in case you’ve got a lot on next week, here’s the zeitgeist tape to get you up to speed on what’s coming up next on Twitter. Warning contains spoilers A Daily Mail columnist will say something outrageous. Twitter will be cross, but will unwittingly support their journalism by amping the shit o

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2011 in my Twitter bios

Web, New Media, Social Media | Lecturing, research, knowledge transfer & exchange at Birmingham City Uni | How I use Twitter: http://bit.ly/2XILW1 Hacking the planet & amping my shit while teaching bright, lovely people at BCU about Web, New Media, Social Media | How I use Twitter: http://bit.ly/2XI

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Sometimes leaving the room is the best way to teach

Not going to your own classroom when you have a class is wrong, right? Students kind of expect us to be there, it’s part of the deal. Our bosses probably expect us to be there too. It’s what you do when your timetable says you should. I’m not going to my classroom today, despite… Continue reading

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Getting Things Sold

I had a little chat with John Polling about switching from Things to OmniFocus. Both are apps built around the popular productivity process GTD – Getting Things Done. DO NOT FRET THIS IS NOT A POST ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY GURU MYSTICISM John had been using Things for some time, but has switched to OmniFo

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Apple glut? Here’s something from Guernsey for you to try

Craig Hamilton was offering around some cooking apples on the Twitters recently and I said “I’ll take a tonne off you”. So he duly dropped a 25 kilo potato sack brimming with bramleys round my house. Fantastic. I’ve risen to the challenge and got busy with my apples. Mum and Dad were coming up, so…

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Media policy explained for the under-6s

CBeebies, the BBC’s preschool channel, has now completed its switch from BBC Television Centre, London to Media City, Salford. There’s probably more interest in the moves of things such as BBC Breakfast (also to Salford) and Question Time (to Glasgow) but I think there’s something quite fascinating

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The “virally launched popstar” as a PR genre piece.

Remember Sandi Thom? She was the punk rocker with flowers in her hair who virally launched with some bedroom concerts via her home broadband that seemed able to support 30,000 instantaneous connections.Well, the soft viral launch myth was back with a bang on my Guardian app this morning. SHARE THI

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Re-reading Six Feet Under: red hair and red herrings

The following is a spoiler laden essay on Six Feet Under, co written with Chris Wills (and also available on his blog). If you’ve not watched the show yet, treat yourself to a box set before you read this. Six Feet Under is a simple narrative complicated by three red herrings: Nathaniel Jr. (Nate),

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Previously on the West Wing (on Twitter)

This is a little catch up post about a piece of work that’s been developing over the past 12 months. Back in August 2010 I wrote a post about West Wing fan fiction on Twitter which highlighted a few points of interest, and speculated a little about what might be going on behind the scenes. I know… C

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Summer Reads Review 1: I play the drums in a band called okay

A few weeks ago I asked for a £15 summer reading list for my Kindle. I’ve had my first block of summer holiday, another block to come, so here’s an update. The first book up is ‘I play the drums in a band called okay’ by Toby Litt suggested by Daz Wright. I absolutely loved… Continue reading Summer

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It’s a shame the police don’t want to chat about my porn problem

Remember how in 24 things would often get kick started by “chatter”? Yeah, chatter – mutterings on the Internet that something is afoot. In espionage drama (and heck, probably real life spying too) the ‘net is monitored for tidbits of this and that which might fall into a sort of a pattern that tell