This page is about online neighbourhoods
I found an interesting blog
which reminded me that I have been doing localised websites for years, from my very first site Blaby.net (Closed down many years ago.)
I got to this via an article I chanced upon in the Joe Public Blog
The piece claimed that there was a ‘new culture of localism’. Well, there is, of course, nothing new about localism, not even on the web. Only a couple of years after the world wide web took off, I put up my first web site, which was about the district of Leicestershire where I lived. I called it ‘Blaby on the Net’ and it brought together information about the local area.
The article on the Guardian site explored how the Internet is giving local people a voice. That reminded me of the recent meetings I have been going to, that were called ‘Amplified Leicester’, where people have been talking about how they are getting activists in very small communities to make use of the web as a way of connecting together and giving themselves a voice.
Finding a voice via the Internet, the authors argue, gives people the power to influence decision-making. Well, nothing new about that and certainly this has been a feature of life on the ‘Net for the last couple of decades. I did, however, recognise the issues that the authors of this recent study have uncovered.
The small, localised websites that I set up were about local information rather than offering interactive portals. I only ever produced flat-bed sites but because they were often the only sites for that area, a lot of people have read them, often from around the world.
Sites such as Stoney #Stanton Village and #Narborough and #Braunstone Town readily came up in the search engines and were for a while the only content available for these neighbourhoods.
Fortunately, the web no longer requires web designers to make sites and if you want to put your stuff up you no longer need to learn HTML. Instead, you can now set up a blog (like this one on WordPress) in a couple of minutes.
All of this does offer the opportunity for local people to talk to each other as well as express their views to people in the wider political system. In that respect, the Internet now plays a real and prominent role in democracy (broadly defined.)
Thinking about another localised site that I run – ArtsinLeicestershire – gathers together a wide range of information and articles about the many shapes and forms of artistic life in the city of Leicester and county of Leicestershire.
As a result of editing that site, I now get asked to comment on arts issues by the BBC, on a fairly regular basis. Which is great, because every time I go on air, our web site gets a spike in its hits. It’s good to see that webzines are taken at least as seriously as traditional paper-based journals.