A site about social media for social good in Birmingham and using the internet to turn public data into something useful.

Archive for December, 2009

The power of social media

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As the Christmas season comes to a close, and we’ve seen the usual traditions trudged out across the globe – there were a couple of elements to this year’s celebrations which didn’t follow the norm and they arose from the power of social media. Someone once said social media is taking us back to ages [...]

Copy and paste hyperlocal blogging

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As the hyperlocal phenomenon spreads across the UK, those who have been doing it for a while now are coming up with easy models for hyperlocal bloggers to adapt for their own website. Philip John has been a very busy bee, working on a number of plug-ins (which you upload to your site as a [...]

Making climate change visible

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Following the confused and convoluted arguments surrounding the climate change summit in Copenhagen last week, a number of journalists have tried to find a way of coherently presenting the arguments for and against scepticism about climate change. David Candless writes on the Guardian Datablog there is little online to explain the arguments to people who [...]

Hackitude gets down and dirty with data

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Over the weekend a small tremour was felt across Birmingham. The distinct rumble was caused by a group of web developers, data hackers and HTML magicians who had gathered to do something wonderful – and the result was explosive. Held at the Aquila TV studios, Birmingham, Hackitude took place from Friday 11 to Sunday 13 [...]

Balance Your Bobbies

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Balance Your Bobbies is a new web initiative from North Wales Police which allows the public to let the police know what they think are the areas of importance for their local police to focus their resources on for their ward. You put in your postcode, and drag the bobby helmets on a scale to [...]

Rounding up a team of local data enthusiasts

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Will Perrin from Talk About Local in a recent blogpost has said he’d like to get together a number of people who are interested in opening up local government data for creative use. This group will meet-up with a government team looking into stimulating application of local government data sets. He invites those who want [...]

Creating a murmur

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Murmur is a project which started in Toronto. They call it a ‘documentary oral history project which records stories and memories told about specific geographic lcoations’ – which doesn’t really capture what it is. People record an audio of themselves talking anecdotally about a location – and these lcoations tend not to be those featured [...]

Periodic table of data visualisation methods

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Stuck for a way to visualise a set of data? This periodic table of methods is sure to throw something up which you might be able to apply to your data set. Move your cursor over an element to see the visualisation. Error: Embedded data could not be displayed.

December Social Media Social

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Our brains are fried, we’ve done a bunch of great social media stuff… it’s time to kick back and have a chat with friends we have met through the Birmingham Social Media Surgeries this year. Our December Social Media Surgery is going to focus mainly on the ‘social‘ part of ‘social media’. It’s a great [...]