I’ll be watching www.birminghamelections.org.uk/ tomorrow night to see how the service, fronted by Adrian Goldberg, delivers coverage of the local elections results.

It’s a job I’ve done myself – anchoring the Birmingham Results for Radio WM and reporting general and local election results for TV and radio. Days on research and spent preparing preview pieces and briefs for reporters etc. Even then I was expressing frustration with the fact that whilst the BBC was making results available instantly online local authorities didn’t.  No RSS feeds of results to allow anyone to upadate their web service live. It seemed to reflect a fear of being the final publisher.  Slowly thats changing and I think it is time that councils begin telling their own stories rather than relying on the mediators.

So lets see how it goes.

Students at Frankley High have returned to their experiment with podcasting which I was helping to support last year. It’s taken a while to get back but we’re hoping to create a learning group where those who worked with us last year begin to show the teachers how to use the kit.

We also went through a fascinating process for a Creative Partneships project – we had a series of teachers pitch to us about how they would like to use podcasting.

It is a really positive starting point for any school work because it helps the staff focus on why they might want or need your support. It allows us to put our effort where we are most likely to find the enthusiasm to turn the skills into something of mainstream value, which of course is likely to further encourage other teachers to experiment with social media.

Anyway thanks to Laura for listening to the warm up podcast for a year 9 group and commenting. Laura also helped me spot this youtube film from commoncraft on her blog. Useful woman: Laura.

Update. Thanks also to Andy for his thoughtful comment on the Frankley Talk blog about the problems of background noise and people with hearing problems.

Lolcats iz hair ing.

Hat tip Jemimakiss.

Since July 2007 my friend Pete Fletcher has been keeping a record of each of his sneezes but waited until today to tell me:

http://sneezecount.joyfeed.com/

He offers these thoughts for anyone else embarking on a counting project:

When choosing something to count, it is important to realize that some things work better than others^c. Sneezes work, but other candidates for counting are demonstrably less rewarding. For example “saying the word fish”, or “cleaning my teeth” are countable, but can be produced almost at will, and so lack much of the joy of incremental documentation. (As well as my delight at the times I’ve sneezed while updating Sneezecount either online or the notebook, thereby generating recursive Sneezecount references.)

Pic courtesy of fernyfern (not Pete by the way)

Click here for a fine series of posts on how some news is now being provided by people writing things called newspapers.  Hat tip NUJ Newmedia blog.