kit I heart Triage: Email First Aid I’ve just got back to work after paternity leave and I blasted my inbox to zero this morning thanks partly to a nifty app for iPhone called Triage. The idea behind this app is that you can snack at your emails and nibble them down a bit between proper email sessions; GTD purists will hate what Triag
idea #altnational – a thank you Last week I floated an idea about making charitable donations instead of Grand National bets, and then I set up a thing to do just that. I was hoping to raise £50, and I ended up raising the limit throughout the day. We ended up with just short of £230 plus Gift Aid donations of… Continue reading #a
idea update: #altnational Earlier I put a blog post up with an idea to do something positive and useful with my general and growing dislike of the Grand National. A number of people gave me some nice feedback on Twitter along the lines of “that’s a good idea” and “yeah I was thinking about that”. Simon Gray signed… Continue
how to ifttt and twitter – rumours of death exaggerated My friend’s Dad once, apparently, said: You can’t fit six people in that car, even with your stripy trousers on I doubt it ever really happened but it stuck and it became a catchphrase amongst us, a hyperlocal meme for the kids of the Prins Estate. He was right, of course, you couldn’t get six… Cont
idea Tote Amazeballs – a half baked idea for tomorrow Ok, so I have a half-baked idea and you might be able to help before I actually throw it together. When I was a lad we always used to have a flutter on Grand National Day. I’ve not done that for a long time now. I’ve become increasingly uneasy with the idea of the Grand… Continue reading Tote Amazeb
PhD How big is a hyperlocal patch? My final word on the size of a hyperlocale Over the summer I wrote some pieces regarding the scale at which hyperlocal media production might operate. It involved talking about postcodes, more postcodes and US cable TV and its broadcast footprints. Beyond that, I’ve been reading articles that claim all manner of sizes and shapes for hyperloc
Learning & Teaching Unfamiliar Tools So, last week I presented my 2nd year new media class with unfamiliar tools in the hope that they would think more deeply about their practice. We aimed to produce a publication that fills the gap left by the lack of an SU campus magazine. Here’s some quick notes about what they (and I) made… Contin
Learning & Teaching MED5008: a manifesto. For five weeks my second year students are banned from using the Internet in their new media class. Above is our production manifesto for the first half of the term. What follows is an explanation. Histories of alternative media* often link the arrival of new technologies with surges of alternative
ref 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
writing “These are my words” – some recent (non-academic) writing projects By my low standards I’ve been pretty prolific the past few weeks working on non-work related writing projects. I always loved doing this sort of thing but for various reasons I haven’t done anything like it for a very long time. First up, 280 Stops. Absolutely loved working
PhD Hyperlocal discourse: the new media & technology repertoire After last week’s seminar presentation, I’ve been asked to clarify the repertoires that I think inform hyperlocal discourse. Those three repertoires again: New media / technology Community & alternative media Professional / commercial media I’m going to begin by unpicking the new media / technology
PhD From the Interactive Cultures Blog – Hyperlocal media: discourses and repertoires I posted a brief report on the IC blog about my talk today to the Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research. This was a dry run based on the first draft of a paper I’m giving to the MeCCSA conference in January – all of it drawing on my PhD work. See the full… Continue reading From the Interac
learning and teaching 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’
PhD The ever present problem of hyperlocale and scale I’m trying to close of a section of my literature review today, which led to me chasing up an old lead that purports to be the origin of the term ‘hyperlocal’ (or hyper-local as was). The reference leads to a business article in the Washington Post from 1991, which outlines a new cable TV news… Cont
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
PhD Hyperlocal: community media / commercial media / other Hyperlocal is a tricky thing to study because there are so many different types of media work and media texts coalesced into the term. It’s almost easier to chart the differences between different projects than it is to pinpoint what they have in common. To illustrate this, let’s look at two differe
PhD More postcodes: hyperlocales, postcodes, and regional variations I must be sounding slightly obsessed with postcodes at the moment… UK postcodes are expressed as follows: B42 2SU. The postcode district in this example is ‘B42’. Frequently postcode districts are used as part of the identity of a hyperlocal website (e.g. expressed through logos and URLs) as a short
PhD Hyperlocal and ‘postcode areas’ ‘Postcode areas’ are often used to define the space – the hyperlocale as I’ve taken to calling it – which hyperlocal blogs serve, for example Sutton Coldfield Local used to be the B72 Blog and that sense of space is still fairly implicit in its coverage despite the name change (see also B31 Voices a
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
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
westwing 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…
ROI 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
food Bean Jar 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 winn
cbeebies 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
PhD What is hyperlocal media for? Part 2 of a positioning statement ahead of TAL12. Part 1 is here. 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; D
