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• Having a plan can prove the objectives behind a social media strategy, as well as a way to measure progress.
• Allows you to:
  • Discover and learn where your audience is
  • Provide extra value to your readers
  • Try things to see what works well and what doesn't
  • Build relationships with influencers outside of organization
• BBC use social media:
  • Newsgathering — Helps them gather more, and sometimes better, material; can find a wider range of voices, ideas and eyewitnesses quickly

I've written a post for the City Interhacktives' "It all started online" year in review series, discussing social media usage for the Occupy Wall Street protests. Read it here.

UPDATED: Now allows you to filter based on a comma-separated list of wards! More accurate application geolocation data based on eastings/northings! Wicked, yo! See below!

Ever wanted a way to learn about planning applications and appeals in the London borough of Hackney? The borough council's website has an ASP-driven search tool for both applications and appeals, but no way to get the latest ones in something as convenient as an RSS feed.

Latest article in the Hackney Citizen, "Houseboaters being 'forced out' from Olympics area." Set as the featured story on the website's front page at time of this post.

British Waterways (BW) has been accused of “forcing out” Hackney’s boaters after it announced plans to limit mooring times and impose fines for overstaying in an area close to the Olympic site.

As part of a project I'm working on for the Hackney Citizen, I'm creating a comprehensive map of a lot of different stuff going on in Hackney. One thing that would be particularly useful would be ward boundaries, ultimately comprising the area of the whole borough.

Much to my surprise, I could not find a single omnibus Hackney ward shapefile anywhere online. Thus I've created one, attached to this blog post.

The UNODC's yearly World Drug Report is always a fun piece of data to play with. For my data journalism course, I've used some of their stats to visualize aspects of it.

Below I've done a bubble chart showing consumption data. The size of the bubble shows total regional consumption, while each slice shows regional consumption of each drug.

What does any of it mean? Well, two really obvious things:

...Well, maybe next week we'll have a meeting at the scheduled time?

Due to Greenslade cancelling his Monday lecture, we bumped up our meeting time to then and had a general discussion.

Where are the most trafficking arrests in London? Where are the most possession arrests? While Tower Hamlets has the most charges for possession in a period from October 2010 to September 2011, Brent has the most charges for trafficking. Data taken from the MET's crime mapping data tables.

UPDATE: there's no Greenslade lecture today (Nov. 14); today's meeting is thus moved to 3:00 p.m.

Just a quick City University London Journalism Technology Exploration Group (CULJTEG) update — last week was supposed to be our first meeting, however, we’ve postponed it until tomorrow, Tues. November 8, at 5:00 p.m. given everyone was super drained following the six-hour public administration fun-for-all that day.

So, to reiterate: very first City J-Tech meeting Tues., Nov. 8 at 5:00 p.m., Saddlers Bar on campus. All are welcome to attend regardless of technical ability, concentration or programme— the only prerequisite is a desire to improve reporting through technology.