On the blog I roughly define local blogs as:

“blogs (or things that are sort of like blogs in that they publish stuff on the Internet in date order) that cover a specific area and nothing else. If that area were to vanish the blog would have no purpose. Someone who blogs about their local area and fishing and carpentry, they don’t get in. It’s all or nothing.”

It’s a working definition and purely serves to give a bit of focus since there are now hundreds if not thousands of active blogs in the city. I’m keeping it restricted to Birmingham because that’s my patch and if I were to cover the rest of the world it’d be too much to process. I’m also interested in the longer term about how these sites network with each other – where are the overlaps and so on.

This relates to the Shift Time blogging project I’m currently working on in Shrewsbury, Nick Booth’s Social Media Surgeries which have produced a number of eligible sites and, of course, Will Perrin’s Talk About Local project which is about to set up camp in Birmingham. Plus countless other things of course but those are the main ones on my radar right now.

I hope folks find it useful and, more importantly, find some of the sites listed there inspirational.

And, of course, I’m missing loads. I’ll add them as I find them but please let me know in the comments below, on Twitter or via email if you know of a likely candidate.

I know I did when Anna Douglas, the festival director, told me about it. Here’s some blurb from the programme:

Dutch engineer and kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen has been creating mechanical, skeletal creature-like devices named Strandbeests since 1990, Made of really basic Blue Peter stuff – plastic electrical tubing and 2 litres water bottles – these gigantic, complex beings get their energy from the wind, so they don’t have to eat like regular animals. Theo’s ultimate wish is to release herds of these new species to roam the world. And while he doesn’t quite get to do that in Shrewsbury, you can see his latest species Umerus – all 13 metres long of it – in The Quarry Park. Come and watch Umerus ‘being born’ on Thursday and Friday with Theo and his team.

Anna asked me if I had any ideas about using “social media” to not only promote the festival but integrate it into the town and I got thinking. After a few weeks of working it out, talking with Jon King (Darwin 200 Officer at Shropshire Council) and securing a bit of funding to make it happen this is the plan.

We’re going to get Shrewsbury itself to report on the Shift Time festival. The buzz phrase here would be “citizen journalism” but I’d like it to be more interesting than that. I want to see this event act as a catalyst that will help grow Shrewsbury’s local blogging scene and embed social media skills in groups and organisation that don’t already have them. And I want to see them take full ownership of this on their own sites in their own voices and not as part of some ill-conceived massive community website.

The issue, and it’s a pretty big issue, is I’m not from Shrewsbury and have no real contact with any online activity happening there. I’m very aware that if someone from another city were to come to my area and, with the best of intentions, try and help everyone start blogging my reaction would be “who the hell are you and could you not be more patronising?” I’m also in danger of making the “build it and they will come” mistake of providing a solution without seeing what the problem is, if indeed there is a problem.

I’m writing this post so I’ve got something to point people towards as I research this and start making contacts in the Shrewsbury area. Unsurprisingly I’m quickly finding a fair amount of stuff:

• Heathly amount of conversation happening Twitter within 15 miles of Shrewsbury
• A fairly active Flickr group for Shropshire (and a less active Shrewsbury one)
• The Shropshire Geek Society who met in Shrewsbury last week.
• A couple of newsfeed-y blogs: ShropshireLife n Twitter and thebestof.co.uk’s Shrewsbury division

That’s from 10 minutes of searching and I’m sure I’m barely scratching the surface.

The plan here is two-pronged. On the one hand we’re approaching and working with organisations and groups in Shrewsbury who don’t have a particularly mature social presence online – this is being done by Rebecca Owen who has the distinct advantage of actually being from Shrewsbury. My job, at this stage, is to see what’s already happening online and to see what the people who are doing that stuff might want or need from me. Or, more interestingly, what I might want or need from them.

Here’s a possible example. Platform appears to be a regular music/arts/etc event happening in a venue in Shrewsbury. From the MySpace:

How do I get involved in Platform?

Platform is all voluntary, so if you want to get your stuff on display you’ve gotta come and do it yourself. It doesn’t matter what you do, we wanna hear about it, we’re open to just about everything. In the past we’ve had painters, sculptors, photographers, puppeteers, fashion shows, live music, djs, dancing, drawing, cartoons, drama, poetry, creative writing, and plenty of fun. We have regular meetings so contact us by phone, email or myspazz to find out when & where.

Their website, platformalteration.co.uk, is currently empty. Would they appreciate some help it developing a blog-style site that could act as their online base? And in turn would they be interested in using their voices to talk about Shift Time?

In summary, we’re offering a number of workshops and resources to show people how they can use online social tools with the intention that once they’ve used Shift Time as an exercise they continue to use them in their communities. There are lots of parallels with Will Perrin’s forthcoming Talk About Local and if the timing we’re better we’d be looking to hook into that. But it’s not so we’re in relatively uncharted territory. Who wants to help us chart it?

Leave a comment below or get in touch.

Which is lovely, except I have no idea. It’s a bit like saying “the way you Brummies use buses to get from one part of the city to another is really intriguing” or “you mean you have chairs and tables in pubs so you can sit down and chat?” This stuff is normal to me, probably because I’m in the middle of it and, thanks to having made Birmingham the focus of my various projects, have nothing to compare it to.

So I need some help here lest Axel go away with a load of rambling from me that amounts to “I dunno really” and a shrug.

What, if anything, is Birmingham doing right social media wise? What can others learn from us? When Paul Bradshaw says we’ve made “Birmingham the sort of social media haven that has people around the world scratching their heads in curiosity” is he talking sense or has he drunk too much Kool-Aid? I mean, I’d love for it to be true. It may well be true. I just have no way of measuring.

I’m meeting Axel at 2pm. The comments box is yours.

I liked the description of Tumblr as “the platform that has essentially reignited the personal blogging movement: reblogs over comments, overheard conversation over discursive prose, clique over mass, fast over deliberative.” I’ll also be keeping tabs on Kevin Kelly’s The Technium “The mission: to use technology as a stick, or perhaps a poker, to shake and jab at society. No one has written more clearly about how technology is shaping — and can be used to shape — culture.” A post to keep returning to methinks.

First off, have a read of Mark’s research proposal. Done that? Good.

What immediately struck me was the disconnect between organisations that are supposed to be, for want of a better word, guardians of culture and the environments in which cultural activities are now taking place. There’s a big emphasis on initiatives that “take art to the people” (Birmingham Opera being a great example) but people are increasingly socializing and engaging with each other in online environments. How does a medium-to-large organisation with a long history and relatively inflexible systems adapt to this without losing what makes it special?

The RSC turns out to be a great example to play with, possibly too good as not every organisation is globally recognised as the modern-day agent of the father of English literature, but it’s nice to start with something tangible and see if the lessons can be applied elsewhere.

My first port of call was to fire up YouTube and see what was on there. YouTube is many things but I find it particularly useful for getting a sense of how people are connecting with culture both through their own performance and by mixing it up and making it their own. Here’s a small sample of what we found.

The King Is Dead – a student writes a rap based on the story of Hamlet to the tune of Nas’ Hip Hop Is Dead. He then took the Kenneth Branagh 1996 movie version and created a music video with Branagh lip-syncing the rap.

Sonnet #38 – Urgelt appears to be a poet and philosopher with a fantastic beard. Here he reads a sonnet “to cheer up a friend who was feeling down.”

As you’d expect there’s a lot of To Be Or Not To Be on t’Tube. This one I liked a lot, for obvious reasons:

Finding myself in a sea of TBONTB I figured I’d do an experiment. I’ve done a bit of video editing on my Mac but am by no means an expert. I probably have the same level of experience as anyone else out there. Could I do a mashup in an evening using all this stuff? Three hours later (most of which was spent waiting for the video to encode and upload after the edit) I had this:

From big budget Hollywood to fixed webcam to animation to musical adaptation and so on, this is a mere snapshot of how people are engaging with The Bard. And even the copyright infringing excerpts are engagement as they’re being shared by people who at the very least are saying “I like this and want to show you it in the context of my online life.” They’ve taken ownership of Shakespeare in the same way one might wear a t-shirt bought at the RSC shop.

So how can the RSC connect with this rich sea of activity around their brand? The personal performances are fine – the source material is way out of copyright – but what about our rapping Hamlet? Should the RSC be acknowledging his “theft” of Colombia Picture’s intellectual property?

That’s up for the RSC to decide, of course, but I think there are a few ways they can deal with this productively. The first is to simply be aware of it by tracking Shakespeare related activity on the web. Simple strategies like tracking the Shakespeare tag on YouTube and spreading the best ones around the company along with things like Google Blog Search, though as they stand these are blunt tools for the enormity of material out there and their use would need a bit of refining. The point, though, is how this awareness of the ways people are engaging with the works can affect the way the RSC thinks about its audience. Large organisations tend to operate in a bubble of excellence, which is not necessarily a bad thing but it does make bringing new ideas and ways of thinking into the mix rather tricky. Making this, to coin a phrase, audience generated content part of the process of understanding the audience could be interesting.

Another strategy would be to acknowledge the work out there, either directly or by creating a “firewall” between the official RSC stance and the online producers. For example, set up blog run by RSC staff members from across the spectrum (producers, directors, actors, educators, etc) that highlights the best of the web as they see it. This doesn’t have to be part of the RSC website or even be branded as an RSC project but the people running it would have a tacit authority. I wouldn’t like to speculate on the effects of this but if an RSC director were to give a constructive critical review of a reading found on YouTube that would certainly be interesting and might help raise the game.

The natural progression of this would be to actively engage with the community out there. So far I’ve mainly been talking about videos but I’m sure there are loads of forums and mailing lists out there full of Shakespeare fanatics. This post where blogger Nicky Getgood stumbled across a Yeats discussion group is quite illuminating. There are people out there who might not be Shakespeare professionals but whose knowledge, especially when approached collectively, is enormous. The RSC could benefit enormously from engaging with them I’m sure.

I’ll no doubt blog more about this as there are many ideas buzzing around my head and I’ve already rambled too long but Mark and I would seriously value your input, either in the comments here or directly by email.