The BBC filming was an invaluable experience but for me it highlighted the difference between how you can allow a story to develop online compared with needing to have elements pre-defined when you start filming. My challenge for Inside Out was based around a FOI request and inquiry with City Council’s press office as to the amount of cycling improvements that had been made in the last few years. I then hit the road to see how the improvements had been installed.

Obviously, filming time is precious and to have a crew follow me round each improvement would have been expensive. The Inside Out package is about the state of cycling in the city, so just me peddling on my bike would be wouldn’t have answered the general question ‘Is Birmingham safe for cyclists?’. Instead this is a montage sequence with some on the spot conclusions at the end then plenty of context and ‘right to reply’ by the council.

I was pleased to see that my Belgrave Middleway coverage was used as a way to introduce but something my online footage allowed me to do was show the extent of the law breaking and to back that up with stats.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Within the confines of the TV programme you get an impression of what happened but you don’t get an in depth investigation. Furthermore, the point of Birmingham Cycle Data was to explore many cycle stories that affect Birmingham cyclists. It mainly using data visualisation to display how a question such as ‘Is Birmingham safe for cyclists’ is a complex one that can’t have a simple answer.

I’d love the opportunity to now take the council cycling improvements story to my website. Ideally I’d display them on a map to visualise the scale of what the council has installed and where. Maybe even gather footage and evidence of me and others tackling them. This in conjunction with the larger exposure of BBC 1 programme would build up a more detailed picture of cycling improvements in the city and make suggestions how they could be further improved.

For now though you’ll have to just put up with my talking ‘helmet hair’ head.

View Birmingham Cyclist Map in a larger map

I discovered an American site called The Right Ride which mapped hazards. It was fairly straight forwards but pointed out all black spots, bad roads and potholes. Most importantly the comment voice seemed to be coming from the community. This encouraged me to take a follow an idea from Hannah Waldram’s investigation and produce a mash-up with FixMyStreet.

I looked for an RSS about potholes in Birmingham. There was no recent news in the feed but there were unresolved pothole problems on the site. I asked FixMyStreet if they knew a way to mash RSS with Googlemaps. They didn’t but they sent me an RSS mash-up of all local problems in Birmingham. I set up an e-mail alert for the Pothole RSS feed and am now able to click through on their updated Google Map and save to my Cycle Map. All ongoing problems are marked in pink with a dot or without a dot if it is unconfirmed. I let Hannah Waldram know about my discovery.

Just before my assignment was due in I thought of another way to spin the story as more potholes were popping up due to the bad weather which I think encouraged others to complain through FixMyStreet and furthermore the map.

I am reasonably happy with my feature and I’ve certainly learnt a lot through keeping my mind open and letting the audience dictate some of the way. However, I feel some traction has been lost in me discovering the story’s direction alongside the audience. For my next news piece I want to show my working less on the site. I find myself agreeing with Janet Koldzy “Research or gathering background information and material, can make a difference between a routine news story and one that attracts and audience and keeps it reading, listening, watching and interacting.” (2006, 107)

Since December I’ve become interested in the idea of introducing game dynamics into news features.

“Could newspapers similarly harness the human need for interaction and stimulation and sell not just boring text news but access to a shared experience?” (Smith)

Rosales also writes on the subject in a short chapter devoted to the subject (2006, 25-27).

I’ve been working on one idea called Spaghetti Junctions. I performed a Google Wave dry run with Andrew Brightwell. I blogged about this in January and Jon Bounds expressed an interest in helping out.

Bounds and I fleshed out the idea. The basic premise is you claim facts about Birmingham – these can either be true (or Chinns named after local historian Carl Chinn) or entertaining myths (or Bulls named after the Birmingham Bull). Points are gained for either. More points are gained if you can connect two facts via a Spaghetti Junction. To keep traction I’ve already prepared some facts which can drop in.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t run through this experiment this semester as the next stage will require a heavily adapted WordPress site. I fully intend to do it soon though. It would certainly be an interesting way to pass on and source information. We even decided that more points could be scored if you presented a recent newsworthy fact. Maybe this was something Bruns had in his mind when he talked about Kovach and Rosntiel,

“These new characteristics of the Mixed Media Culture are creating what we call a new journalism of assertion, which is less interested in whether something is true and more interested in getting it into public discussion.” (2005, 57)

There’s also a chance that we can make this game geo-located, linking facts to places on a map. If the player reports a ‘fact’ from the spot itself then I believe it might be edging towards what Espen Aarseth calls a ‘Community Game’ (2009).

This is the opposite of Foust and Hathaway:

“Not only can such interactivity increase the community’s interest in topics of importance, it also can increase the particular news organization’s standing in the community by providing a sense that it listens to its audience”(2005,13)

This was also confirmed with a post by Robin PC on the Help Me Investigate site. I realised that in pursuit of mashing-up available data, I had lost focus on why I was making the map. I responded to Robin’s post saying his comments would help my feature.

I took stock of my actions and put a summing up post on the HashBrum site. The purpose of this was to allow the public to see how I had reacted to various comments and what my plans were. I had to redesign the first post so that people visiting the site could navigate their own way.

“Because the Web can be either linear or non-linear, web journalists will have to understand both concepts and be skilled enough to present information in both forms.” (Stovall, Allyn and Bacon 2004, 42)

I cut the original post down to encourage contribution to the map still and provided a logo-link to SMIDSY.

“For the Web journalist it needs to be lateral. The journalist needs to ask ‘How can the story expand?’”(Stovall, Allyn and Bacon 2004, 63)

I decided to start gathering my own data and humanised my story by getting on my own bike, inspired by a feature in Guardian Society. I realised that an old bike that I inherited was perfectly adapted to snow conditions for reasons explained in the Audioboo. I was also playing with new technology having ordered an Android phone after Christmas. I attempted to take pictures from the journey and send them whilst cycling mobile via Pixelpipe and Tweetorium.

The idea was to not only give the story a human angle but also peak peoples’ interest. I teased Snow Bike on Twitter with links that lead to The Boo or pictures. In its raw form, this multimedia project lived on my blog. My bitly rating were pushed up as other people on Twitter including @benjibrum and @kevingilmartin retweeted it. I also commented on the Guardian website which produced traffic for my site as well.

I installed an application onto my phone called Sportsrunner which tracked my journeys. Although it was a sporting device that highlighted speed trials and personal bests, it did allow for comment notes section. I was therefore able to write a little about each track and mention any hazards I saw. I then transposed these hazards onto the map. I put up a post on HashBrum and also encouraged people on the Birmingham Cycling site to contribute if they could get the technology.

I bought a Kodak Zi8 and decided that I would test Robin PC’s claim that the best way to avoid an accident is make sure you are seen by motorists. He suggested cycling further away from the kerb, so I decided to put this to the test using a Flip Mount on my handlebars. I was on Snow Bike that day, which gave me something extra to talk about. I then edited the footage down and published it on YouTube. I also commented on a Podnosh post on Flip cameras which again drove some traffic to this site where I displayed the story alongside a map tracking my progress using VideMap. The story was fragmenting across platforms and I liked it.

“News, in other words, is no longer made up simply of a complete, self contained news item, but breaks into a series of primary reports (for example of updates as they unfold, or of various news items written from different perspectives) background information, discussion, commentary, and related and further information.” (Bruns 2005 218)

I tied various multimedia parts together on another HashBrum post, moving from mapping the stats to tracking my progress. I grabbed another perspective on safety and the kerb rule when I got my bike chain fixed. I then compiled my Robin PC footage together.

Find out how I finished my story but can’t stop pedalling in part three.

Part 1 – Pedalling The Raw Data

This feature began with a simple observation, I’d started hearing and reading more news stories where cyclists had been involved in accidents. This interested me because I had been cycling into work. Working at Metro Newspapers at Fort Dunlop, I considered pitching a story to Birmingham Post about commuter cycling so I filed a Freedom Of Information (FOI) request on road deaths involving cyclists in the West Midlands.

When I started this course I began to think about different ways in which story could be told. My FOI request came through and I decided to map the deaths. I felt mapping could graphically represent the accidents which would help cyclists think about how they ride in that area. However, my FOI request had a significant flaw, the accidents were not located.

I put the FOI on the HashBrum site alongside the map and set about trying to find the accident locations via news stories and police reports. I also launched an investigation on Help Me Investigate.

“The first step in community organizing is to listen… you show that you are willing to not only listen to other voices in your online community, but to amplify them. That takes you into the second step in community organizing, building relationships.”(Niles)

I responded to each comment and I hope I succeeded in what Axel Bruns would call “dialogic, coversational, unfinished news” (2005, 53.) People showed me other experiments that were taking place, other data that was available and successful national mash-up maps.

I was encouraged by the different experiments taking place but they all stopped short of what I wanted for HashBrum. Dave Harte showed me a mash-up created by Times Online made from data which had been passed to me the day before. In December, I was shown a UK Crash Map on the BBC site. They were expansive but I wanted something more local and with more detail.

I was told about a similar investigation that was taking place in New York but no results had been mapped. Hannah Waldram was inspired by my experiment and launched a similar Help Me Investigate for Cardiff which I duly joined.

“Digital age journalism is now also interactive. Until recently it was a one-way process… this is no longer the case. Discussion and debate over all kinds of issues is enhanced by the digital age.” (Herbert 2000, 2)

I also received attention from the cycling community in Birmingham, including CTC and Birmingham Cyclist Blog and they both started following me on Twitter. One person who runs the Birmingham bike forum also contacted me in the New Year when a cyclist was involved in a serious collision in Solihull; I worked this fact into my story.

However, I was frustrated that I, or anyone else for that matter, couldn’t find the older news stories to corroborate the FOI stats I had. I spotted another US site called Bikewise they seemed to have access to full police reports.

I went hunting for other data. I discovered a site called SMIDSY (Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You) a campaign launched by the Cycle Touring Club (CTC) which encouraged cyclists to report near misses and even get legal advice. I asked the administrator if I could access their data, they refused but were encouraging about the investigation. They offered some tips such as ‘the cycling community prefers using the terms crash or collision rather than accident.’

I decided the only data I could use was the UK government statistics. I decided I could marry the Birmingham pinpoints up with some of the missing FOI accidents. Following our mapping lesson I looked into ways put these stats on a map and then limit it to the Birmingham area.

I launched another task using Help Me Investigate and spent many hours converting the stats to Longitude and Latitude and trying different sites that could accept a large amount of data. I tried Mapalist, Many Eyes, Google Earth Pro but I couldn’t convert them. I contacted @Psychemedia a mash-up specialist but couldn’t get it to work. When I disappeared into the world of Python I had to give up.

Find out how I got back on my bike in part two.

My FOI Request of cycling accidents and their locations came through and I was able to put the details straight into Mapalist. I exported as KML and re-imported but for some reason the details about the pins didn’t copy.

So, even though these pins look a bit untidy in the larger map, they nevertheless should help cyclists take more care in accident areas.

The key is on the larger map but the general gist is:
Blue hued pin = cycle incident
Pink hued pin = cycle hazard
Primary colour = fatal accident

View Birmingham Cyclist Map in a larger map

Staying Updated
Through an RSS from FixMyStreet I’ve been tracking potholes that have been reported to Birmingham City Council and also pinpointing any potholes mentioned on the Council’s Twitterstream. I will also be tracking my own cycle journeys and keeping an eye on any other hazards I see.

If you would like to add any hazards please feel free.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I went to Sprocket Cycles, off Allison St Digbeth where Gordon quick-fitted a new bike chain in 3 minutes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I also grabbed a short audio interview with Gordon talked about cycling safety, National ‘Bike’ Service and just what is the correct kerb distance?

If you click through to Details beside each track, you can see I’ve written a short piece on each journey in my Notes section. These act as a summing up of my journey including any safety concerns I see. If you’d like to add your routes and comment on your experiences (and you have an Android or Smartphone) then this App should cost around £5.99. Once you’ve got it if you could let me know below and befriend me.

I’m also hoping to export this data and it will inform my next map based on experiences of people road cycling in Birmingham.

Find out about my first cyclemap here.