By Paul
Ok, maybe not fully mapping Derby and maybe it’s a bit rough round the edges, but this should give you a good idea of the impact of Social Media in Derby and possibly inspire you to do something similar or even better?
A fair few Saturdays ago, I was bored and thought I’d see how much of Derby was on Facebook. I began to search for key areas (political wards or neighbourhood names), issues, people, places etc and plotted them as nodes on a Mind Map using MindMeister.
I tweeted to Tim that I was doing this and invited him to collaborate. It grew exponentially as we both edited it live and quickly moved beyond Facebook into something more indicative of the many sites in use by or known to both of us.
You can view the map for yourself below and draw your own conclusions about what it tells us. Everything on the map is freely available to public searches. All we have done is carry out those searches for you and put them all in one place.
A Mind Map illustrating the extent of usage of Social Media in Derby, UK.
City of Derby Social Media Map by Paul Cole and Tim Cooper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
The map was briefly made available at LocalGovCamp in a session I ran entitled, “Are we listening?”. This session and the discussions it raised have been covered very well already by Sarah Lay, Jack Pickard and Pete Ashton. All posts are definitely worth a read.
I had hoped to have a hyperlink (the small arrow) from each node taking you straight to each web page. Unfortunately, these have only (mostly) been added to Facebook so far.
You should be aware that there is an issue with the links to most of the Facebook Groups as I incorrectly pasted the link to the search results for the group and not the actual group address. This will take me a while to rectify, if I do it at all. To get to a Facebook group with a faulty link, simply copy and paste the exact title as it appears on the node into the search bar on Facebook. Links I have added for Facebook Pages and other sites should be OK.
The map is presented as is, that is, as it was created on that day. It may not be organised perfectly or logically, but it does its job as far as I’m concerned.
The simple experience of searching for and finding what is out there was a good learning experience in itself. You can take what you want from it or try it for yourself in your city or area.
Please share your thoughts with us.
This was a really interesting session at LocalGovCamp (thanks for the link to my post) and I’m looking forward to having a chance to look through this map at greater length and detail than we had time for there.
I think it shows a huge amount of activity for the city alone – and I am sure it could be added to daily. I don’t know whether it is feasible to map the county in the same way. If anyone had any ideas about this I’d be glad to hear them!
Nice Work!
Wish I could make it on Thursday, but…. work
Are you planning any “evening”/weekend events?
Interesting that you’ve included the Derby Gripe – always hoped that site was done with a sense of irony, but feared it was for real!
Are you planning to include other sites etc. outside of the City at some point. Ambergate Carnival (included on your links page thanks) is using FB, Twitter, RSS and hopefully moving to a blogging format for it’s website soon.
I’d like to do some work to expand on Tim and Paul’s map in order to stretch it out to county wide. However, I’m thinking that is a pretty big job.
Maybe it is something we can look at doing as a collaborative project through the cafe?
Certainly more than open to planning future meets on evening and weekends. The plan is to also hold them around the county, not only in Derby. Have one planned for Matlock on 3 December but as yet no confirmed time or venue – could possibly make that a late afternoon / evening affair?
Tim, Paul and I have started the ball rolling on this get together but we’re welcoming suggestions for format, venue etc so we can keep it all going and it is useful to as much of the digital community in Derbyshire as possible.
Sorry you can’t make Thursday – keep an eye on #smcderby for back channel chat from the meet.
Hello,
Love the map but we seem to be omitted from most of teh categories. For example we have a MySpace, Youtube and FLICKR presence. We also have RSS feeds for our news and Blog. We are also one of the heaviest users of Twitter and are not featured on there either. Is there any reason for this? Not moaning just wondering as we pride ourselves on investing time and resources into our social networking and the map makes it look like we don’t do very much!
Adam
Thanks Adam.
Well spotted. No, there is no reason for the omissions. It was only meant to give a rough picture, rather than be an accurate depiction.
As a manually updated map, it’s probably going to get to an unmanageable state if requests start to pile up.
We may look to devolve some of the updating to others in the future, perhaps making it completely open? We’ll see.
From my point of view, I started out looking at just Facebook and more specifically unofficial groups and pages created by people, rather than businesses and organisations.
I think that, even as a snapshot of a broad range of groups at a certain point in time, it allows us to learn something about how people use Facebook.
However, I will add your extra nodes, when I get a chance.
Well done for your efforts. I’m sure we could all learn a lot from your experiences.