#21VC

21st Century Village Correspondent

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What have Facebook in Palo Alto, CA, got in common with Addiply and Loddon, Norfolk?

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Look what we got perched on top of the tower at The Holy Trinity Church. Installed on Friday (8 March), we're one step closer to serving up high speed broadband access to the communities of Loddon & Chedgrave via the Diocese of Norwich’s WiSpire initiative.

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Here's the video interview our Rick did with @cyberdoyle, the Queen of Rural Broadband, shown at yesterday's #1000Flowers.

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Missed #1000Flowers?

Fret not, catch up with the day's events at your leisure...

Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five - Part Six

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TODAY: #1000Flowers, the whole event live, here, from 2pm.

iPad/iPhone? Can't see the broadcast? Watch live via bambuser.com...

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Coming very soon: #1000Flowers, 5 March, 2-6pm, Newcastle. For full details, click here. Live broadcast of the entire event starts here at 2pm.

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Coming to a church tower near you...

With a fair wind and ideally a bit less snow, within the next few weeks the tower of Holy Trinity Church will allow the communities of Loddon & Chedgrave access to higher speed broadband via the Diocese of Norwich’s WiSpire initiative.

As something of a digital ‘missionary’, who travels the length and breadth of the country flogging both his wares and his thoughts on the ‘Digital Revolution’ now firmly afoot, I can tell you that the way in which the Diocese and the Bishop of Norwich are ‘lighting up’ such rural communities as this from the top of one church tower to the next is widely admired.

‘Wow, that’s genius…’ has been heard more than once on my conference travels. At home and abroad.

For out there in the wider digital world, people instantly ‘get’ the opportunity the Bishop is delivering to his rural flock; the way in which he is seeking to return the church to its traditional medieval role as the ‘hub’ of every local community.

It also helps that he also owns the highest roof space in such communities; not to mention the big, pointy thing that has dominated the skyline in Norwich for 800-odd years.

The fact that he also sits on the House Of Lords Communications Committee and is, therefore, at the heart of whole national debate about the speed and success of the proposed roll-out of ‘super-fast’ broadband via the BDUK process makes the arrival of his own, faster broadband network to Loddon that much more significant.

Step out of Norfolk and view the world from the halls of Westminster and there are some fascinating politics afoot when it comes to the arrival of higher speed broadband to the banks of the Chet.

But, of course, WiSpire’s arrival is only half the story.

This is where things take an ever more interesting turn.

And for which we all have to thank NESTA’s Destination Local funding; a £50,000 grant awarded last summer to just ten communities across the UK that puts Loddon & Chedgrave at the very forefront of the nation’s digital media thinking.

NESTA’s partners in this include the likes of Scottish Television (STV), the Welsh Office, Guardian News & Media, Mozilla, OfCom. All of whom will now have Loddon in their sights this summer.

So…

WiSpire in its usual guise is just AN Other ISP – an Internet Service Provider for your home broadband. Like a BT, a Tiscali or a Virgin. Only their connection comes down from on high. And not off a copper wire.

What we are now about to do with that same, broadband ‘pipe’ to the top of Holy Trinity is to splice a dedicated line off that to feed a free, wifi ‘cloud’ that will extend over the principal visitor areas to the two villages.

Think of it this way.

If you go into any coffee shop these days – and Starbucks led the way – you have the opportunity to ‘Sign up’ to Starbucks free wifi and surf the Net whilst supping your skinnie latte.

That’s what we’re building here. Only our wifi cloud lies over a village; it is not just in one coffee shop.

But there are two tricks left up our sleeve; two reasons that makes our wifi cloud different to that of a Starbucks.

First, as you sign in, you will see local news about the community; it will be the home page for Ben Olive’s excellent LoddonEye platform.

Return to those same corridors of power in Whitehall and one of the big issues vexing our lords and masters is who, on earth, is ever going to report the affairs of a local, parish council meeting if the local newspapers continue to retreat from such communities as Loddon?

In the jargon, how do we address the ‘democracy deficit’ at parish council level?

The answer, for me, is by supporting local young people like Ben; by rewarding them for their part-time reporting efforts in the same way that the old-fashioned village correspondents were paid by the local newspapers… by village advertising.

So, think of the ‘user journey’ that this community will now be able to offer its visitors.

A family of five moor up at Loddon Staithe. In an instant, the kids are on their mobiles, checking into FaceBook; Nan wants another book on her Kindle; Mum or Dad want to check their emails off a lap-top. Or find somewhere local to eat in the evening.

So they look for a wifi connection. And they find one.

They find news via Ben; they also find local adverts via our hyper-local ad platform, Addiply – adverts that will not only help support Ben and his successors continue to report on the affairs of this community, but will also sustain and extend the infrastructure ‘network’ that delivers this opportunity.

I am The Dilraj; why advertise on this platform? Because I know that anyone seeing my advert must be 500-yards from my front door. They have just moored up at the staithe…

If I am the Co-Op I can now push out offers at seven o’clock every evening for my perishable goods; knowing that anyone who sees that offer must, likewise, be sat beneath the village’s wifi ‘cloud’ and can therefore pop in to take full advantage of that offer. 

And when WiSpire arrives in Acle before the year is out, we just repeat the ‘Loddon Model’ there.

One final point to note. If we have the connectivity to deliver mobile broadband to anyone on a wireless device in the middle of the village – be it a Smartphone or a tablet – we can now deliver content in video format.

Ben can interview the Chairwoman of the Parish Council on his mobile phone and that short, video clip can now be ‘broadcast’ to the village off the top of Holy Trinity church tower. Your ‘TV’ will be your mobile phone.

Are we, therefore, building Loddon ‘TV’?

A sustainable model for truly local TV that we could replicate in every parish across the Diocese? Give 00s of Bens the chance to take their first step into a career in digital journalism and allow 000s of local businesses the chance to better market themselves in this new Digital Age?

Maybe... 

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We've been busy plotting and scheming of late, hence the quietness round these parts. It's been well worth it, because we have some pretty pleasing news about Addiply to unveil...

thanks to the good people of @betarocket for covering our tale so thoroughly.

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The coalition government has pledged to expand broadband connectivity to homes and businesses in remote areas of the UK by 2015 - although some innovative solutions are already plugging the gap, reports the BBC

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It's not a case of making life harder for the village correspondent, it's all about empowering them argues Rick Waghorn.

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Startup and tech news site betarocket.co.uk says nice things about loddoneye.com and there's a really good interview with our Rick too.

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Apologies; it's been a bit quiet on here of late...

... Blame the summer and then Addiply deciding that it wants to go all Welsh this autumn. But things continue to progress; next up is designing the portal - and giving the community of Loddon their chance to have a say. Working with NeonTribe in the city, we would hope to have a 'paper' model built by the end of the month for people to get all 'hands on' with. As part of that process I was asked for a 'brain dump'; to throw some ideas at Harry and his team. Part of which involved looking to America for inspiration. For this guy is interesting; Howard Owens - runs the most successful hyperlocal site in the US, The Batavian. It looks a bit home-spun, but it makes money... and the local advertisers love it. This is worth a read: http://howardowens.com/2010/09/21/7359/ His thoughts on how you keep people like him and our Ben reporting on the affairs of their local community. On that basis we will look to offer lots of 125x125 square button ads; for those that like to be better than a text ad. And we will look for *prominent* top banner ad placements for your Co-Op Locals, Barclays Banks Plc (Loddon) etc. Those national brands seeking local spaces that can afford to pay that little bit more. So three 'tiers' of advertisers... £150/mth for you, Barclays (Loddon) and a prominent banner on the home and inside 'channel' pages... And then, say, £30 per month for the mid-sized squares; and maybe a fiver or a tenner a month for 'classifieds'. Plus, of course, the over-lay text ads onto video; price tbc. Other design 'dumps' included: * The video unit has to be central; and then 3-4 stories running around it... * Channels of local, Loddon/Chedgrave content as per usual... Live, Learn, Play, Eat, Stay, Work, Worship. * If possible, can we take our *design* heads off, please. * Functionality and ease first. The *BIG* points to prove are ability to move the simplest of parish magazine advertisers/adverts online and to build something that *could* deliver village TV. * Future according to Google's Eric Schmidt is 'mobile, local and social...' And video. So let's do that then. * Probably more FB led than Twitter for 'social'; and yep - at the end of it all - anything smart we can do for mobile. Over to you, Harry. Go play with your paper models.

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Collaboration has always been at the heart of Addiply's intent...

A swift story – before we crack on.

As people may recall, Addiply was part of the winning bid for WalesLive, the IFNC platform that never was for the good folk of Wales. It is why we have always hankered for a return; one that, hopefully, moves ever closer as we start to play with the language strings within our new-look API.

Up in the North-East, David Peto and his team at Aframe were, likewise, part of the winning bid for the North-East. The one that included TrinityMirror, Ten Alps and the Press Association.

Aframe do very clever things with video in the cloud. And by simply being part of that whole IFNC process, clearly *get* where the future of local TV in this country may be going. If it’s not off a big, tall mast sat atop a hill above Mold.

So there we were, hyper-local networked-focussed ad platform set to roll through Wales – and a smart piece of video thinking ready to help underpin the future of local ‘TV’ in the North-East.

Two years later and the pair of us have finally got to meet. And together – in the spirit of collaboration that we all seek in these experimental days – we now sit on loddoneye.com, the home of our #21VC NESTA-finded project.

Here… http://loddoneye.com/video

The usual range of caveats apply; it is just one, tiny, tiny toe in the water; both deal and kit set up for the specific purpose of seeing how we might start to monetise hyper-local news video going forward.

We have work to do to make such a service available to all Addiply’s publishing clients; it is – for now – a one-off pilot with Aframe as we play to Google to their YouTube. So, we shall see…

And a quick round of thanks; to David and his dev team at Aframe; to James and our Ian on the Addiply side; to Phil John on whose JournalLocal platform LoddonEye currently sits; to Ben, NESTA and Simon at the White Horse for being game for a first ad.

And, sure, the video is old; it’s a demo. The point, for me, being that we can now offer the White Horse, Chedgrave, the chance to advertise their wares to that ‘audience’ – many of whom might have started said parade from the pub’s own car park.

To get their ‘brand’ in front of that hyper-local audience, that text ad has not had to go via California and back to find its natural home in front of 3,000-strong community on the banks of the River Chet.

And if anyone else wants to take that opportunity, then Ben (Olive) – the publisher of LoddonEye – has the kit to do it:

https://beta.addiply.com/network/inventory/10190

Simple, transparent and straight-forward. I just want to over-lay my local text ad over a local piece of cloud-hosted video…

Aframe is not the only video show in town, but the ‘fit’ works well. Drop them a line if video is the next thing on your shopping list…

What’s interesting next #21VC-wise is the ability for Ben to potentially now manage a ‘showreel’ of video content off his portal platform; have say five or six 90-second video clips of an interview with the parish council chairman, the local bobby, the retiring undertaker – whatever.

But in the midst of that ‘showreel’ why not find a national advertiser seeking space for a locally-focussed, 30-second promo ad? Co-Op Local advertising their commitment to Norfolk growers? Or Taylor-Wimpey Homes showcasing their new housing development on the old Express Plastics factory site?

What might that ad opportunity be worth? Perfectly focussed, perfectly relevant and perfectly-placed for an audience that is ever more likely to see video as part of their daily lives; particularly when delivered onto mobile.

Is the answer to ‘Local TV’ in this country really going to come off a TV mast? A mast that can do Norwich, but can’t do Ipswich. Can do Birkenhead - if everyone's aerial is pointing in the right direction.

Addiply, hopefully, starts to empower people like Ben to monetise his media wares, just as it empowers people like Simon, the landlord of the White Horse, to ‘find’ his own local audience on platforms that are ever more relevant to how people will live their lives in the 21st Century.

And it won’t be around the Beccles & Bungay Journal; nor ITV Anglia; nor BBC Look East.

And Aframe is the same; it’s an empowerment device for Ben and his ilk to manage their video space in a smart, simple and efficient manner. It even enables Ben to ‘export’ his video offerings at the touch of a button… and syndicate upwards his ‘exclusive’ footage of that nasty, fatal RTA on the A146 last Tuesday afternoon…

That, for now, my well be in the future.

But as the 20-odd contenders for Jeremy’s Local TV crown jostle for his attention this autumn and start to pin their commercial hopes to being 240ft up the nearest TV mast, so we’ll go with Addiply, Aframe, a part-time, 21st Century village correspondent and the church tower.

Rick Waghorn

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... and that first first throw, as mentioned below in the 'Initial scribbles, the first throw of the dice' post...

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That first scribble as mentioned below in the 'Initial scribbles, the first throw of the dice' post...

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Initial scribbles, the first throw of the dice

Many, many moons ago, a good friend of the Addiply family – Harry Harrold of NeonTribe in Colegate – and I sat down with a blank piece of paper and scribbled out a portal content play for the city of Norwich.

It was at the behest of a certain defence giant who, at the time, was gearing up to deliver a Wi-Fi/wireless solution for the city; in many ways just the big, metropolitan version of what we’ve now scaled down to deliver here in Loddon & Chedgrave.

The original sketch (see above) eventually scaled up to a presentation; one that featured ‘channels’ of content, all supported and surrounded by locally-sourced advertising. The thinking is the basis for what we now intend to deliver to Loddon & Chedgrave, with Ben up-top delivering the local community news; the Bishop and his WiSpire initiative delivering the kind of connectivity a certain defence giant once aspired to bring to Norwich.

I’ve also attached the first ‘throw of the dice’ design-wise, just so everyone can start to get an early feel for what we intend to deliver now that our NESTA funding has been secured.

And there’s a big *but* at this point... but be aware that is not the finished design; nor has it been anywhere near a designer. That is just me playing on a PowerPoint deck late at night to demonstrate the kind of opportunity and functionality we hope to deliver later this autumn - things like local classifieds, a video unit complete with the ability to overlay a text ad onto it. That kind of thing.

The other trick is to remember that there are three ‘strands’ to this proposition; what we are trying to do is to pull them all into one community space – one that we can then, hopefully, repeat time and again across the rural face of Norfolk.

First, of course, is Ben’s LoddonEye community news platform http://loddoneye.com which really ought to need no further introduction. His are the first two columns – only now he’s coming with a video player attached. One over which we can now overlay an Addiply text ad. Just as Google does over YouTube. Only we’re doing this for Loddon & Chedgrave. And we’re not working with YouTube.

The third column belongs to the Bishop, the Vicar and Holy Trinity Church – that’s the space where visitors to the community can ‘sign in’ to access the free wireless signal that will be piped into the church tower come later this autumn. The idea being that someone can moor up at the staithe of an evening, switch on their mobile, their laptop or tablet and be presented with that ‘landing page’ – just as they might if they rocked up at Starbucks.

Now, however, they can ‘source’ local content on their arrival – go into the ‘channel’ marked Visit and find their way to the Dilraj, The Kings Head, Rosie Lee’s… or wherever. We have a marketing opportunity to help ‘drive’ fresh business into local providers. All via a state of the art portal platform.

The ‘Learn’ channel I would hope will appeal to the schools; now we can showcase their work in a digital setting; ‘Live’ can bring us live bus time feeds, updates from the Medical Centre; news from the local councils. As well as offer links into the community’s other content sources; we have every intention of being as open and as welcoming as possible in this space.

The other ‘trick’ to note is the old fashioned ‘classifieds’ pages down to the side of the portal landing page; like the national and local advertising spaces, this will also be powered by Addiply – we will build a fresh, classified ‘grid’ to simply enable the kind of local ads that you would traditionally find pinned to the wall of the chip shop to find a new home in this space – and, don’t worry, we will charge accordingly.

Because – ideally – much of the heavy lifting commercially can be done by those national brands seeking such ‘local’ digital spaces as ours. Barclays Bank Plc (Loddon) might, for example, see clear PR benefit to be had from backing such a venture…

But have a look; nothing is yet set in stone… and won’t be for a little while yet. But now you have a first ‘feel’ for what opportunities would seek to deliver into this space.

Rick Waghorn

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Doorways and Personal Journeys: What #21VC Means To Me...

I am well aware that I am one part of a bigger project. But as the eponymous 21st Century Village Correspondent I want to share some of my musings on what this means to me.

When I graduated from university in June 2010 I had poorly structured plans for my next step other than a vague notion that I’d get a job at a local paper and work hard at forging a career in journalism. As many graduates are still finding out, life just ain’t that easy. It quickly became apparent that I was going to face stiff competition to get on work experience placements, let alone even being considered for a paid journalism position. I was woefully unprepared for this.

To avoid dragging frustrations I set up The Loddon Eye that October. Initially the idea was twofold – I would keep myself writing while also providing an online presence and coverage that was distinctly lacking in Loddon. It didn’t take long for me to become caught up in an ever-growing world of hyperlocal websites and discussions on the future of local media.

While it may not be the conventional career step I can now look back and feel grateful that I wasn’t able to slip into the obscurity of an entry level role at a local newspaper. Following a different path has made me fascinated with the essentially unanswerable question of where the future of news, particularly local, lies. Newspapers seem increasingly archaic in this lightening quick digital age. A digital age, however, where many seem to be eager to run before they can walk. Uncertain times.

But these are exciting times and I am glad to be wrapped up in the midst of it.

Funding from NESTA suddenly changes the picture. On a personal level it is incredibly gratifying to have some recognition that The Loddon Eye wasn’t a daft idea all along. It goes a little way towards answering the numerous voices along the way that have questioned and made me double-check myself. But more importantly it means that The Loddon Eye can be elevated from a very basic, thrown together hyperlocal site into a key part of a really strong and unique project that could have a genuine impact on the ongoing digital revolution of community media.

Unfortunately, even for all the innovation and community goodwill, the issue of money is never far away. At the moment becoming a Village Correspondent wouldn’t begin to touch a full-time wage in a secure job. It is unlikely the role will ever be anything other than supplementary. But, as with almost every university graduate, this isn’t about the income. It’s all about the experience. It’s the platform for me to sell myself and show what I am capable of. A show home if you will.

I despise the regurgitated spiel that spouts from careers advisors across the land, from secondary schools through to university, that getting a career isn’t just about your grades, but as much about how you differentiate yourself from the crowd. I always thought this was obvious advice but difficult to implement in reality. When every budding journalist is writing for their college paper suddenly you simply become part of a still-numerous crowd of “smart kids who have written for their college paper”. But I have to concede that the careers advisors did have a point. I am now in the very fortunate position that I have a chance to do something different, cutting edge and (assuming all goes to plan) standout.

We are often billing #21VC as a ‘doorway’. The first step is a doorway to Loddon. A doorway to local news, businesses and events. A doorway to the high speed WiFi being streamed off the spire of Holy Trinity Church. A doorway to a platform that digitally enables a community through from the kids starting at school to their grandparents.

But I am also incredibly aware that #21VC is a doorway for me. And, looking to the future, a doorway for many others in my position. This is all about enabling people, from grassroots up. 

Ben Olive, Editor, loddoneye.com