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Hi, I'm Phyllis Stephen, and I'm the founding editor of the Edinburgh Reporter.
The Edinburgh Reporter was set up in 2010, and since then it's grown from zero audience to
an audience of over 60,000 unique users every month and last month over a million pageviews.
I do lots of things at the council. I attend the council meetings - I seem to have got
a chair on the floor of the City Chambers with an electricity supply for my computer,
and I live-blog it.
We now have a huge variety of reporters, many of whom are journalism students because it
gives them a window for their work, and also a variety of other people who just like writing
about certain things, or they like taking photographs.
I do think it needs lots of support for a proper Scottish hyperlocal scene to develop. We only have a handful of websites,
and I don't think that so far we've had very much in the way of support.
I'm Alastair Tibbitt, and I'm a volunteer for Greener Leith.
Greener Leith is a charity and it's been going since 2006. It was established by local volunteers
and it aims to promote community engagement, better public spaces, and sustainable
development in Leith in Edinburgh, and one of the key ways we do that is through the website.
We're up to more than a thousand posts now, so we've been doing about five posts a week.
And we don't just write about our own activities, we write about other stuff that's happening
in the community, other events, and of course we encourage people to take part in consultations
and public meetings - and then we promote the outcome of those.
Leith has the smallest amount of greenspace per head of population for anywhere in Edinburgh.
And Leith also has some of the most deprived parts of Edinburgh. It also has some fairly
well-to-do bits, and one of the things that makes Leith fascinating is the fairly cosmopolitan
nature of it. So there's a lot going on in the public spaces that we do have, and there's
a big discussion to be had about how we get the most out of them. And that's not just
parks, where we are now, but also the likes of the streets -
how we can make them fit for the future.
Some of our consultations we've had nearly 500 people taking part in a question over
what should happen to the future of a street. Those kind of responses are almost unheard
of really, when it comes to people taking part in planning decisions about their street,
and so we I think we can connect with a lot of people, and if you invest in the audience,
then it's an audience that you can engage in local issues in a way which perhaps the
public sector hasn't managed yet.
I'm Mike Rawlins, I'm from Turriff in Aberdeenshire, where I run a small local blog called My Turriff
and a tourist information site called Visit Turriff. I also work for a company in London
called Talk about Local, and we're developing augmented reality apps to let hyperlocal bloggers
deliver their content in new and interesting ways to consumers. And I'm in sunny Leith
today to road test the augmented reality apps using content from local blogs here in Edinburgh
like the Edinburgh Reporter, and the fantastic Greener Leith.
The Talk About Local AR app is designed to be simple. Geo-tagged content from the web
appears as floating symbols on your tablet or smartphone, with an info bar at the bottom
of the screen. Tap through to take you to the story - such as this one on the Greener
Leith blog about nearby Pilrig Park. Back in the app, you can select a map view to show
you exactly how to get to the spot the content came from. Adding content into the system
is also simple. You simply copy the URL of a site with geo-tagged data, paste it into
the AR software, add "feed", and save. In this example, 64 Greener Leith posts have
now appeared. You can add the necessary geo-location to your Wordpress posts using a free plugin
- just search for the location, and click on the map.
Augmented reality is a fascinating, fascinating potential, if you like.
The interesting thing about augmented reality is that it's all about geographic
location. And it's another way for us to be able to put our content right where it's most
relevant to people. So, as on our website where we have a news map where people can
look around and see where the most recent stories are, which are right on their doorstep.
A hyperlocal website is all about what's happening right on their doorstep, and if we've got
an app which demonstrates that effectively, then that's brilliant, and thanks to Talk
About Local for putting it together.