The traditional perception with Birmingham is that we do plenty of creative and cultural things but we don’t like to shout about it. Cllr Martin Mullaney has pointed out several times during this City Of Culture bid that as a city we have very low levels of cultural engagement per head of population. I was determined in my role as Social Media Manager to increase engagement and prove that, given the right platform, we would shout about it.

My first day on the job involved working on the 24hour Blog run by Jon Bounds. We received a phenomenal amount of contribution to the Posterous site in a 24 hour period. Since then our engagement was spread across Facebook, Twitter and the main website.

When monitoring other shortlisted cities social media activities it was interesting to discover their bids were mainly limited to Facebook. We on the other hand had a much larger amount of Twitter followers. Today it passed the 1000 mark.

Only eight people were allowed to present the Birmingham’s case to the judging panel in Liverpool, we wanted to increase our presence. Birmingham had plans to take a Battle Bus which would stage cultural flashmobs around Liverpool on the day.

Public Relations Manager Geoff Coleman mentioned doing something similar to 24hour blog and I pitched the idea of using Cover It Live as a scrolling commentary which could be displayed ‘in the room’. It was important to gather all the different threads across multiple platforms. I also thought it was an ideal opportunity to make a virtual event out of our final submission. I passionately stated at the time,

“Can I just say that Birmingham’s strength as a digital city is one of our greatest assets and it would be doing ourselves a great disservice not to do something really innovative.”

I’m pleased to say that it was a success, there were around 900 messages of support over the period, and the Council Site where Cover It Live was embedded reported a spike of over 1000 unique users.

@Katchoo has blogged about what it was like to be involved in the event. A point well made was that it wasn’t just the usual people mentioning the same things. The real success of the event came from the variety of comments, the amount of people involved and the many cultural things Birmingham offers. We’re a culturally rich city that deserves recognition. And for once we really shouted about it.

Since last semester I’ve been thinking about designing a game called Spaghetti Junctions.

Following a few experiments in other areas, including trying to wrangle with Ruby On Rails, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and attempted to get a prototype running on WordPress.

I’ve adapted the platform for my needs, without much technical knowledge. Credit for using WordPress must be given to Jon Bounds who suggested the idea. I had been concerned that I might be giving away too much by letting people ‘behind the scenes’ but I didn’t realise how much control I could have over what I can display and what options are available to users.

I’ve installed various plugins which have allowed me to enhance the experience. Firstly I’ve put Ultimate Google Analytics in place so that the back end doesn’t get bogged down in the built in stats. Secondly, I’ve installed a Countdown Timer so that I can create round times and therefore maintain interest through levelling (for the purposes of this test period this isn’t set). And I’ve installed WP-Tables Reloaded to create a scoreboard.

At the moment this score board is a manually updated CSV, Excel sheet with the calculation boxes deselected. It’s uploaded but I don’t think it will take too much trouble to make this more ‘live’ by running this through a more automated Google Doc. At the moment I’m having some issues with it being able to correctly parse this data. If anyone has some tips it’d be much appreciated.

I’ve also tried a lot of mapping plugins. The easiest for users to use in a post is WP-Geo however although I can activate polylines I want to be able to use them to display specific Spaghetti Junctions. This is one of the main points of the game. I’ve got a feeling I might need to delve into JQuery. One alternative solution I thought of was exporting the everything into my own Google Map and then manually adding. Is this possible?

I’m now using a very versatile plugin called Geo Mashup which allows me to add polylines it by marking it in the categories. I can also download the KML. However it still fairly manual.

“Manual” is a keyword here. And this is my main obstacle to overcome if I was to make this in anyway scalable. If there was some way of automating the review process so that the facts or myths could be approved via rating might be some solution to having an all seeing ‘Chinnmaster’. Also I need to work out a way of further automating the score process. I suspect the answer might lie in Ruby On Rails. At least I’ve made a start!

So here is Spaghetti Junctions. Please play it and let me know what you think so far.

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).

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.