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Helping Hyperlocal

Journal Local is sponsoring Hacks & Hackers Manchester!

September 6, 2010
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I’m really excited about this! Many of you will know Journal Local because of the emphasis on hyperlocal, but it’s also a platform for niche journalism and a consumer of data for re-purposing in support of journalism or hyperlocal reporting. To that end the sourcing and mashing of data is very interesting to me. It’s [...]

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Patient Opinion release new, thinner widget

July 5, 2010

I blogged a while ago about Patient Opinion’s new widget that offers site owners the ability to embed a widget about health services in their area into their web site. At the time there were a number of items of feedback, including the width which was too wide for most blog sidebars. In response, Patient [...]

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10 ways for hyperlocal sites to work with local papers

June 19, 2010

This one has already had a good dollop of re-tweets and blog posts about it so I thought I’d leave it a while before posting this to give it a *bump* (and because I’m rubbish and only just got round to it). David Higgerson, who’s a top bloke from Trinity Mirror and looks after their [...]

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Content ideas for hyperlocal web sites

June 18, 2010

Our lovely friends at Talk About Local have trained many active community members to run their own sites but they say they often struggle for ideas after the first few posts. So they’ve started a list of content ideas for new hyperlocals to get started. They include things like local festivals, wildlife, transport and local [...]

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Add NHS customer feedback to your web site or blog

May 28, 2010

Patient Opinion is a great service that allows anyone to provide feedback on their experiences of health services in the NHS. They’ve just realised a widget so that you can embed recent feedback based on criteria you select to your web site. You could use this to provide additional information to visitors or to supplement [...]

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Democracy Club: a celebration of local volunteers

April 30, 2010

Democracy Club is a volunteer-driven website for crowdsourcing democratic data which is otherwise hard to find.  Yesterday, with TheyWorkForYou, we launched the UK’s first-ever survey of candidates.  Voters can type in their postcode and compare candidates’ opinions, and are also helping gently pester candidates who’ve not answered. We’re really pleased with the results: answers in [...]

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8 quick tips for covering the general election in your community

April 23, 2010

Lots of people are talking about how social media will play a big part in the outcome of the general election this year, much like it did for the presidential elections in the U.S. last year. However, I think there’s an opportunity for hyperlocals and community sites of all kinds to really shine this year [...]

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OpenlyLocal begins collating hyperlocal council reporting

April 23, 2010

Chris Taggart has just launched a new feature for his OpenlyLocal project which matches the massive wealth of accessible council information with articles from hyperlocal web sites. Using the well-established pingbacks system used by many blog platforms, including the very popular WordPress, Chris’ site will now show any hyperlocal articles written about a certain councillor [...]

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It’s not just a web site, it’s a community

March 25, 2010

Over at Talk About Local, Clare White has written some great tips on managing the online community that inevitably rises up around a hyperlocal web site. Highlights including dealing with ‘idiots’, dealing with being ‘too small’ or ‘too big’ and volunteering versus business. I’ve decided to contribute my own tips to supplement Clare’s good work. [...]

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Patient Opinion: hyperlocal conversations about health services

March 10, 2010

You may have come across Patient Opinion already – a site which enables people to share their experience of local health services in public online, and see what others are saying too. The site is run by a small non-for-profit social enterprise in Sheffield. I’m one of the team. Patient Opinion was the inspiration of [...]

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