This is the first time in three months that I have decided to blog. There are many reasons for this but one of the most important is a rapid life transition. This site was specifically set up to track my progress through my MA in Online Journalism. So for a while after I found that I had essentially blogged myself into a corner.

Things have also changed for me geographically too. The week I submitted my final dissertation, my wife and I loaded several vanloads and transported ourselves (and an obscene amount of CD’s) to Manchester.

Of course, the process of gaining employment has been slower. I made a conscious decision whilst I was studying that I would stick to freelance for a while, do enough of that to keep me in reasonable comfort and only go for staff jobs that I really want. My wife often reminds me that this is a somewhat privileged place to be in.

So, I’ve been trying to find my footing in the Digital Manchester community – attending Social Media Surgeries and Cafes which have evolved in quite a different way to the Birmingham versions. These differences I will certainly mention and discuss in later posts. In the last few weeks I have begun to start working with the good people of Inside The M60. My progress here will also be written about soon.

I have carried work up North with me. The Birmingham City of Culture Social Media work continues not least because we engaged a sizeable amount of people during the campaign and it would be a shame to ‘disengage’ them. The Facebook and Twitter still continue to promote and celebrate the cultural delights that the city has to offer – large and small.

I’ve also begun to preach a bit of what I’ve practiced with a Visiting Lecturer role at Birmingham City University helping first year BA students understand the basics of journalism. Most recently I have also started to teach MA Magazine Journalism students of City University London how to complement their final printed production with an online presence.

If I’m honest, the most interesting full time jobs still seem to be in London and if I do find the right job maybe we’ll pack up and migrate there. For the moment however any London work is achievable due to my sister-in-law and Village Underground who have agreed to offer me a bed as long as I promise to occasionally “do something amazing” for them.

These current commutes have one definite advantage: long train journeys give me time to write. So at least once a week from now onwards I intend to reflect on what I’ve been doing. Track 23 is now on the rails…

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.

A bug bear I have about Birmingham is creativity occurs on the fringes of the city, and often this can make us appear self deprecating. It’s almost as if were embarrassed by our artists so we push them to the outskirts. Don’t get me wrong, I’m behind the redefined Eastside. In fact I wrote the brochure’s main copy. But where I struggled was working out how to make art accessible and appealing in description, without appearing to trivialise or belittle ‘the art.’ A picture paints a thousand words, I just wanted people to visit Eastside and make up their own minds. Hopefully, many will this weekend.

The great thing about CiB shop’s centrality is that people can check it out, with very little effort. If this shop was based in Digbeth, for example, they wouldn’t have a fraction of the footfall. Take a look at this large and diverse mix of people in this 30 minute sample (recorded by me at 11am on a Thursday).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Okay, Pete Ashton in particular acknowledges it’s “in a shopping centre” so there are a few pieces that might be too leftfield for this consumer-centric audience. But its strong centre-stage presence is great exposure for all artists adorning the walls and shelves. And intrinsically Created In Birmingham features independent artists creating original pieces.

Besides wouldn’t it be great if when the City Of Culture judges get off the train and the first place they pop into is this shop?

Once I’d re-located the sites and venues using my own memory of the walk (with a little help from Birmingham Music Map) and Chris Phipps himself, I firstly geolocated everything in Audioboo then inserted the information on my own map.

View Home Of Metal Birmingham Tour in a larger map

My original plan was to embed audio onto the pinpoints, but currently Google Maps doesn’t allow you to use any kind of audio player. The nearest I could achieve was to embed a YouTube slide-show into my map – click on the Town Hall pinpoint at the top of the map as an example. As I mentioned in my last post, my main objections to YouTube are its clumsiness and untidiness, it would be better if you could resize the slideshow and view it like this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

A site called Woices uses Google Maps API to embed a walk. So far the site pretty much does what I can do below, with a touch of Social Media added.

More interesting is the Infospot which allows you to customise the site and access to analytics. In addition to the normal download option it can be triggered by Geolocation for iPhone users. I’ve been playing around with a trial version which isn’t viewable to the public.

To make this customised site viewable it would cost 59 Euros a month! This would be great if I had funding for this project and there was some kind of revenue model. A more cost effective way of producing this would be to set up a map in Flash, research Geolocation and maybe build a phone application myself.

If this was to be a more permanent serious tour project, I would also need to pay Chris Phipps for the use of his material. And even ask him (and others) to talk about other venues and their experiences of Birmingham’s musical past. I would also need to consider how the newly relaunched Home Of Metal site is developing. Home Of Metal is after all a place where non-professional Heavy Metal fans can share their own experiences, memories and stories.

Finally, I need to consider how far this has moved from being a journalism project. News sites often geolocate stories and many online news projects can act as archives to preserve the past. But is recording the past, and creating and maintaining tours the responsibility of the journalist, a civic society or a historian?

STOP THE PRESS… @hadleypaul just alerted me to this beauty by @buddhamagnet

View Boobase Home Of Metal marks in a larger map

Te great thing about this is that it finds the boos by tags, so if I were to add more venues to Audioboo and tag them ‘Home Of Metal’ they would also pop up here!

Finally, I’ve created a full podcast with musical interludes to give you time to walk between pinpoints.

For added visual treats and ‘chapterisation’ why not download the enhanced podcast?
(right click, ‘save target as)

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).

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was quite fun but as you can see it collapsed when we used Wave to discuss ‘the process’ of the game. And I couldn’t engage enough people in Wave to make it worthwhile.

It might be more appropriate to run it in Twitter but I think before I jump on there I want to work out how to get people understand how the game runs. I was thinking I might put some rules up either here or on #Brum site.

If it has a click through WordPress page to I might be able to take the game to a second stage and prove or disprove the facts or myths, offering more background and links away from the focus of gameplay. This might be the journalism but the degree of proven truthfulness could be used as a points system of sorts.

Well there’s still a lot to work through… Would love to hear what you think of this idea, or if you have any strong opinions on the following questions then speak your brains below…

Is Twitter the best place to run the game?
Should I be wary of too many rules?
Any ideas how I can get more folk involved?
Should there be a live geo-tagging picture version – and might that get you extra points?
Is there anything we can use to graphically show the facts so it represents a load of spaghetti links?

Just before Christmas, I was invited by Capsule to talk at their first KMKY event in association with Created In Birmingham.

I’ve just found the audio on my dictaphone today so thought I’d put my talk online for you. You can right click ‘save target’ for the MP3 here or you can listen to it below.

I was first on so Jon Bounds introduces the concept at the beginning.

In addition to introducing ourselves we were asked ‘What would you do with a space like Vivid’. I decided what Birmingham was missing most of all was an informal meeting place for artistic creativity to flow. As it turned out there is one, but the fact that I didn’t know about it until the talk probably says more about the success of this ‘informal chit-chat’ night.