great map of #hyperlocal websites from our good friend @countculutre #lgcommsroadshow

This issue came to me last week and it worthy of much thought. In fact it's probably the biggest issue facing those wishing to see blogging take off at a hyperlocal level. In short, those producing the blogs are part of the communities they're writing about so if they write something controversial or unpopular this can affect them personally. We haven't spent much time looking at the dynamics of the local communities which we're looking to network in new ways. I suspect they might be more complex and fragile that we imagined. And someone might get hurt.

Ironically I'm not a fan of websites that aren't traditional news organisations being part of Google News but since Google has decided to open the gates a bit here's a handy guide to getting your site considered for inclusion. Notable that it has to be a team effort.

Will Perrin's 4ip project to jup start local blogs around the country will start to take shape in August when Mike Rawlins of PitsnPots and Nicky Getgood of Digbeth is Good start working for him full time. The means there's now a funded organisation with the job of getting people blogging about their local areas and supporting them in doing so. Never thought I'd see the day.

Will Perrin introduces the backroom division of Talk About Local where folk play with stuff related to his project to produce interesting new ways to engage with local areas through the web. The first project is Jon Bounds' intelligent blog aggregation and I expect much more to come. Get in touch if you'd like to play.

Give it some text or a link to a web page and it'll try and figure out where it's about. Adding geolocation data to web pages is going to get interesting soon and this is a quick and dirty way to do it.

Jon talks through the process of building a Yahoo Pipe to intelligently aggregate local blogs. Amongst other things this helps answer the question "what are all these local blogs good for?"

"Tom Steinberg once said that that, on the web; ‘If you don’t want a fight, don’t set up a boxing ring and invite people in‘. Good community sites follow this maxim and create a climate in which people don’t get abusive. Traditional newspaper websites of course don’t – by setting up a story as a ‘controversial issue’, you invite people to have a scrap."

Jon writes a four part account of the fantastic work he and others did over Christmas translating a council consultation document into Plain English and turning it into a blog so the issues could be discussed and not simply commented on. This project is now being used nationally as an example both of how cheap / free social media tools can be used to connect with citizens and how the public can use them organise quickly and effectively. Essential reading.