Taking Out The Trash

Bloggers big bash in Bristol

What’s the Blogging Story

October 22nd, 7pm / Watershed Media Centre, Bristol

Who can you trust when the new media meets the old? An evening of debate with mainstream journalists and bloggers. What’s the relationship between traditional and new media – the tired and the wired as some call them? Is blogging journalism? And who can you believe in this age of blogs, tweets and pay walls?

Join Roy Greenslade (The Guardian), Donnacha Delong (NUJ Vice President), Sunny Hundal (Liberal Conspiracy), Brooke Magnanti (Belle du Jour) and a panel of popular bloggers to determine who will dominate the future of news.

A Bristol Festival of Ideas event, in association with the NUJ Bristol branch, the University of the West of England MediaAct project and MediaWise, as part of a weekend study on the impact of the blogosphere.

Blogging Hell!

Pervasive Media Studio

Leadworks, Anchor Square, Bristol

Saturday October 23rd, 11am-1pm

Finding common cause across borders: Planning for international action on media standards.

What’s the role of online journalism in sustaining democratic societies? What role can the blogosphere play in more rigidly controlled societies? Can bloggers develop systems of self regulation that could enhance journalism standards?

This is the opening workshop in what promises to be a long-running debate.

 

Jo Bloggs – but is it journalism?

Pervasive Media Studio

Leadworks, Anchor Square, Bristol

Saturday October 23rd, 2-4pm

Is blogging the new journalism? Are blogs a new, democratic kind of publishing, giving a voice to everyone? Or are they just a platform where gossip, speculation and bias are passed on as fact, and nothing can be trusted?

As the lines between traditional and citizen journalism blur, how are mainstream media owners and regulators responding? Are the interests of citizen journalists, bloggers and mainstream journalists the same or contradictory? Where does the National Union of Journalists fit in the new media world? Should bloggers be able to join the NUJ?

Join leading bloggers and mainstream journalists for a revealing discussion and some possible resolutions.

 

BBC blogging pt 2

Well, 90% of what I said ended up on the cutting room floor mainly because, I think, I spoke a little too rapidly and my sentences were too long.

However, you can read about the BBC West Politics Show on blogging and there is also a links to the iPlayer record of it as well.

My main point was that blogging has become an increasingly popular news source for journalists (because it's quick and easy and confers a veneer of expertise) but for bloggers to get their stories accepted requires the mainstream press to valdiate them. (cf McBride and smeargate).

And too many people are on the wrong side of the digital divide for blogging to be anything other than a useful additional tool for journalists and politicians at the moment.

Bath & Wilts blogging: your starter for 10

BristolKRS posted a great comment to a post of mine from a few days ago bemoaning the limpid blog scene in Bath & Wiltshire compared to Bristol.

I've reposted the comment below in case you missed it.

As for building a better local blog scene or community or whatnot, I think that once you've found other sites locally, the linking up and cross-fertilising comes naturally. The Bristol blog scene is after all as atomised and at times as discrete as any other grouping of people or organisations linked only by geography.

The intersecting interests of the Bristol bloggers (often in relation to the shared aspects of their blogging - a sense of place, and from that, issues such as local government and politics, planning issues, an incorrigible disdain for career politicians at all levels tempered by a willingness to enter into discussion with them, and so on) I think is simply an example of the way strangers on the internet come to interact with each other after the initial dance. Every blog post heralds a negotiation, a negotiation over agreement and disagreement; whether blogger A agreed with blogger B in the past over issue C is neither here nor there once they're onto issue D. The style and grace with which each blogger addresses the issue is as individual as is possible, and will be seasoned with all manner of variables - mood, timing, off-stage and unstated motivations (a family crisis, perhaps, or a lack of time to spend blogging in detail due to problems at work), personal beliefs, political alignment, an open goal for a cheap one-liner...

Of course, all of these things are to a greater or lesser extent applicable in the 'real world' too; it's just that this being a written medium, it lends itself more concretely to form and structure.

Erm, rambling a bit there.

Some practical suggestions for kickstarting a Bath/Wilts blog scene:

# Put together a long list of Bath & Wilts keywords - places, people, issues - and methodically search for blogs writing about them - use the blog-specific Google search, as well as searching individual blog platforms like Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger, LiveJournal etc. Don't forget to search through tags and categories too.

# Use the same keywords to search through the microblogging & tumblelogging platforms and RSS management social networks - Twitter, Jaiku, Blip.fm, FriendFeed, HelloTxt, Plurk, Tumblr etc - this should harvest a few more local or local interest bloggers via their profiles.

# Use a blog reader like NetNewsWireLite (free) to manage subscriptions to all these blogs so you can keep abreast of what's being written without having to methodically visit each one directly.

# Make sure you cross-comment and cross-link in comments on local issues across as many of these blogs as possible (in a way that can't be construed as spam!)

# Maintain a thorough blogroll covering local and local interest blogs, and encourage your fellow bloggers in Bath/Wilts to do the same - and contact your local dead tree media and get them to publish a local blogroll on their website (a la Evening Post: http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/news/Bristol-bloggers/article-769023-detail/article.html )

# Create catchy local memes that grab your fellow bloggers - like TBB's Red Trouser Gate, which, you might say, definitely had legs...

# Blog in a manner which lends itself to crowdsourcing, and invite input from readers and other bloggers.

# Plug other blogs when they're writing good stuff, as well as your own - especially when commenting on big hitter non-local blogs, or forums etc.

# Tag your own blog entries methodically!

I'm sure this is all stuff you're already doing, but maybe not. Best of luck!

Blogging and the BBC

Just done an interview with Dickon Hooper from the BBC West's Politics Show for a piece this Sunday about politics and blogging.
Passing swiftly over my meagre contribution, look out for James Barlow and Kerry McCarthy MP who are must reads if you are at all interested in Bristol bloggers and politics in particular.
Meanwhile I was interested to see Freelance Unbound celebrate a huge rise in his/her/their Technorati ranking. Up some two million places. Go Freelance Unbound.
So, of course, I had to check out my own ranking and I think 816,035 is pretty reasonable, um, based on  nothing more than it's below a million.
(That's enough stats, ed) Need to start putting together an article for the Guardian's Work section on people who staff complaint lines which should be done tonight and then heading to London tomorrow to the studios of This Morning.

Update 1: Technorati's top blog by authority is the Huffington Post (Iain Dale is 2,500ish - watch out Iain, I'm catching you up).

Update 2: kind of appropriate that this is the topic for my 200th post.

The wasteland that is Wiltshire's blogosphere

I spoke earlier with a BBC reporter who is researching a piece for The Politics Show about blogging.
I mentioned that in Bristol, while traditional print media was declining, bloggers were having some success filling the gap when it comes to holding people and organisations to account.
See this for instance.
But as you go further east, while the print media is similarly tardy, the blogosphere becomes ever more quieter.
There are now parts of Wiltshire, patricularly on the Hampshire border, which are a wasteland as far as traditional and new media are concerned and it's just the good old parish magazines left.
So is our new unitary authority, which serves a population of over 400,000, getting an easy ride or the press it deserves from the print media?

Hat tip for the BBC contact to Felix Farley's Bristol Journal

Watching the watchers

There's a rather rabid debate on Iain Dale's blog with regard to proposals for some kind of oversight body for blogs.
Getting away from the EU/Labour/Big Brother conspiracy theories which Dale's readers lapse into, I think the responses do miss a vital point: accountability.
Their answer seems to be, if you are traduced you can ignore it or sue. But bringing a libel action is notoriously expensive and ignoring it doesn't stop a libel being spread.
Blogging is not a level playing field however much gurus of web 2.0 might like to believe otherwise.