links for 2011-04-12

They say it is the first time a hyperlocal news site has focused on a working-class, immigrant community in the United States. Their goal is to make Our Chinatown a real-time news source about Chinatown, not only for its residents but also for outsiders –- in both English and Chinese.

The big issue it raises for me, in relation to Your Square Mile, is whether there will be training and support for the local online community builders. I should think SocialGo can delive the technology – but it is people who create the content. Is anyone supporting the Village SOS online managers?

Facebook Pages on the other hand should only really be updated around once or twice a day, depending on how you are managing the community. If you update a page too much you could find yourself losing likes. Worse still, your likes/fans (what do we call them these days?) could just hide your posts from their newsfeeds altogether because they see them as being too regular and intrusive. Because they see Facebook as a pleasure not business. So you feel like you are engaging with a huge wider audience when actually you are only communicating to yourself – sound familiar?

In what's being described as the 'world's first' live broadcast of a village cricket match, a group of people with an interest in improving rural broadband have organised themselves using Twitter to film the Easter weekend match.

that's potentially very interesting news for local journalists facing yet another round of newspaper cutbacks, because if smaller communities will support viable hyperlocal community websites there's potentially more jobs covering the news in those communities to go around.

One of the most prominent effects that he describes has been the rise of “networked individualism,” which has a potentially transformative impact on how we consume content and interact with traditional group-oriented institutions, like organised religion. He proposes that the web puts the individual at the centre of his/her community, rather than the community identity.