onionbagblog

Changing Platforms

“Some sites start out on blogs for instance and then suddenly grow massively on Twitter or Facebook. Formby First rapidly acquired a 2,900 person Twitter following, Visit Horsham morphed from a traditional website to a Facebook page with 12,000 likes in a town of 55,000 people in only a few years. Sites like On the Wight make a vast contribution to plurality in areas where there is little media choice and a dominant print press.”

@willperrin raises some interesting issues about the organic growth of online platforms [URGH] whilst considering the wider issue of possible hyperlocal legislation.

It’s the nature of the beast that you build something with a particular focus, and then the community rather helpfully takes it in a completely different direction.

This is good.

I wasn’t quite sure what *I* wanted or what the *community* wanted in putting the Wivenhoe Forum online almost three years ago. You can politely guide the conversation when it falls off the periphery of what is acceptable, but the beauty is that the userbase dictates the content.

There’s a Facebook page and a Twitter feed - I’ve made it quite clear that these are purely one-way pubishing and not a platform in which to engage. This is mainly a time constriant issue, but also getting back to Will’s point, the original source could be dwarfed by the power and reach of established social media.

Plus I rather like the idea of the complete data set and content being owned independently by the community and the individual authors, rather than farming out the content to the behemoths of BIG social media.

Meanwhile, the MOTHBALLED Colchester Chronicle continues to surprise me. Time (and location…) made this an unstainable [URGH] model for me. Hyperlocal blogging about a particualr place, when I am working and playing (and kinda living) back in Transpontonia, made it slightly less than transparent.

Traffic however for The Chronic continues to rise, day by day. The url points to the DEAD Twitter feed, itself a platform that is continuing to pick up pace whilst remaining dormant.

Over 3,000 followers - what the chuffers to do with this online community?

The medium is the message…

And that message is Content is Crap.

#localgov Lucky Dip

“O2′s Local Government Digital Fund will provide digital expertise and technology to help a single council turn plans to improve mobile working, workplace collaboration, or citizen wide communication into a practical reality.”

Disappointing that EVERYTHING seems to be deduced to a crapy Dragons Den style pitch. Why not reward innovation and risk without being linked to profit?

Great PR for O2, although £250k won’t buy you much.

Betcha the winning bid bangs on about ‘connectivity’ and ‘enabling digital communities’ by… putting in place a ‘sustainable hyperlocal nework.’

Um, why doesn’t O2 just improve the network that customers currently pay for?

Middle Class Moans

“I’d say it’s a rubbish time to be a middle class Londoner…”

Try being part of the proletariat, Comrade.

“And as for the poor, Slough, Bradford and Leicester await.”

Not content with a sly dig at the working class, Ian Steadman of the New Statesman then manages to diss non-Metrolpolitan areas - and also overlooks the ethnicity issue in his chosen satellite towns.

He’s spot on about the City of Death though.