How to Be a Londoner

There are two types of Londoner. Born and bred. Or not. Those in the first category will tell you there’s only one type of Londoner. This is a harsh stance, I know: and for me it’s doubly ridiculous as I am the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant. Mum’s family on the other hand hail from Hoxton, Bethnal Green, Essex Road: now resident in Bognor Regis and Harrow. I have only ever lived in 3 postcodes, and for the first time ever I now live closer to a dual carriageway than a corner shop. When we moved into our posh new flat, the first thing my sister asked me was: ‘is it 020 8?’ ‘Yes, but it’s still SW2′ I snapped.

You pick this sort of crap up in the playground. A school playground. A London school playground. Although of course London school kids never think about being a Londoner for one nano-second. They know they are Londoners. Simply attending (or at least having your name on the register) of one of these excrutiatingly awful institutions is enough to qualify you, if not as a true BnBer, then at least as some sort of sub category. Although only a sub-category.

So if you want to blag it as a bona-fide BnBer then here’s a few top tips:

1) Starting with schools. Never (never ever never) say to a Londoner: ‘yes, well we love it here, but of course we wouldn’t dream of staying here when we have children.’ Get back to the shires! If I had a penny….seriously, we went to those schools, they WERE shit, but they never did us any harm, salt of the earth, what’s good for the goose… etc and besides, kids like smog. Asthma? We LOVE IT!

2) Don’t complain about how London is so unfriendly, you know, the way nobody ever speaks to anybody else when you only shop in supermarkets, live in a gated community in the ‘East End’ and ALWAYS travel to your job in the City wearing an i-Pod.

3) Don’t live in a ‘gated community’. We like them of course (keeps the rabble off the streets) but if you can find me a BnBer that lives in one of these monstrosities (that is not a council estate) I’ll eat my trilby cor blimey guv’nor I will.

4) Never cross the road at the crossing. Amble for as long as it is possible without getting hit by a car.

5) Don’t say: ‘Oh, I never go out in North/East/South/West London because North/East/South/West is best’. Parochial bigotry is a subtle art and while a Westie will always be a Westie, true BnB’ers see the whole city as their playground. This is really a terribly, terribly common mistake amongst arrivistes who are in over their heads and it helps sort wheat from chaf like a large combine harvester thresher type thingy (as a Londoner I’m afraid I simply can’t be more precise).

6) Do say: ‘that’s not Maida Vale, it’s The Chippenham’. If you’re going to be a parochial snob then get it right. Specificity is everything. (NB: These are not sub-categorical areas created by estate agents, but are invariably LESS posh than the district they are supplanting.)

7) Don’t refer to streets as the A23 or such like even when giving directions. Roads have names not numbers. If it doesn’t have a name then you’re not in London.

8) Do tell me to SOD OFF and get a life and/or a decent postcode. I deserve it.

Project Curious

I bumped into the lovely Jules Mann the director of the Poetry Society at a launch the other week and she invited me to take part in ‘Project Curious’ with Nokia. It’s with their branding peeps and the broad aim is to create a dialogue with poets around content, text, image and how we use our phones in the creative process. The ‘creative’ results are on Blag Lady but I thought it would be interesting to talk about the process and relationship with various media here.

I have for a long time been thinking about text and poetry: as poets take all words terribly seriously, wherever they find them . This has included sending bizarre emotional texts to myself at fraught moments in my life in an attempt to make myself remember what I would rather forget and thinking about the disjointed nature of the dialogue that text produces. Of course there’s txt language 2 but I’m more interested in how the brevity and syntax impact on communication and meaning than locating a few lost vowels.

The brief from Nokia was broad, basically equating to ‘send us stuff’. Like all good branding campaigns the blue sky white board produced the word curious ;– which proved to be a very productive spur. I decided to conduct a text survey, and asked all those who I thought would in my phone, to ‘ask me a question, any question, I will answer it if I can’. Incidentally I did a test run on this with a tiny but representative sample but got the question wrong: I asked ‘you have only one question (in this life), what is it?’. This produced ‘how?’ and ‘why?’. So as with poetry, BIG questions tend to produce BIG abstract answers – whereas what we want is nuggety specifics. This holds for all forms of creative writing: all the Holy Texts are brimming with particular example .

The response rate amongst poets was lower. This made me think that perhaps as poets we are more engaged with investigating answers than we are posing questions. I always find it difficult to articulate questions.

Other findings that are media specific:

• The exercise confirmed that text is a very intimate medium. It was different to sending an email or blah blah-ing on Facebook. The interaction was between two individuals, and I don’t think Iwould have had some of the responses I did – eg ‘should I finish/bother with him/her?’ if I had used more ‘public’ mediums.
• For the follow up – I am posting on two blogs – but I then decided to let people know the results via text. It seemed consistent and right somehow.
• I produced my first ‘user-generated’ poem – and posted it on Blag Lady – I never post unpublished poems – but as it was produced in a ‘hi tech’ manner I thought it would be appropriate.
• I haven’t used Facebook to notify people yet: there was a time when I might have put a note on my wall, but these days you have to scroll through seventeen million super-poke-pro-scrabulous-Ilike-top friends-zombie-vampire applications to even get to the super wall never mind the wall. I could have posted it as ‘an event’ but I think that might have been a little bit over the top, as even the most top of the toppest bloggers could hardly call a new post ‘an event’.
• This brings me back to the subject of the last post – on marketing as authentic communication. Save the ‘events’ notification for the ‘events’ and stay true to the heart of the endeavour. (Good news for Vodaphone – I may exceed my monthly text bundle.)
• Incidentally, I have since learnt that Facebook offers MyQuestions which I declined to download as I was sick of downloading applications and too busy playing Scrabulous. (By the way does anybody know how the legalities of that work – have they got alicence from Parker/Scrabble or what?). It’s a very similar idea, but I didn’t know about it. Also 118 118 have that at the end of their texts – which is a servcie they offer. Again I was ignorant. Which is good – must mean my zeitgeist mojo is on the money.

Also: one final note, on creative SERENDIPITY. As I was walking home along the river I came across some stencil graf that I wanted to photograph for Blag Lady. It was a picture of a sexy girl, but up close in the detail was a ‘to be or not to be that is the question’ detail. I used ‘that is the question’ for the image on the post. This in my opinion is the sign that you are doing something right. Everything is in place. All you need do is continue.

Check Blaglady – link in sidebar – for more q n a action this week.

The Creative Blogger

This week I ran a seminar at Skillset which is the Sector Skills Council for the Audio Visual Industries looking at how creatives can use the blog as an online notebook.

Most of the participants did not blog, whether for professional or leisure purposes, so the initial discussions centred around an introduction to blogging as a medium and format. Two of the participants were beneficiaries of the Technical Change mentoring programme run by Women in Film and TV to support women in the industry. We discussed ways in which blogging might enrich their creative practice and also the issues around blogging about our professional lives, confidentiality, the impact on how we market ourselves as freelance creatives and whether recording our process could be something useful on an individual level.

For me, using the blog as a writer has deepened my creative practice by taking me out of my professional zone – text and words – and got me uploading photos from my phone and thinking about the relationship between text and image. It has also kept me regular, as they say, and sharpened my understanding of relationship with audience. I have toyed with the idea of doing a photography course, because I enjoy it a lot, but I am reluctant to try and ‘train’ myself beyond being an enthusiastic amateur. I’m currently taking part in a project run by Nokia and The Poetry Society- looking at ways in which poets use their phone as part of their creative practice. Can I have a new Nokia N96 prototype now please?

This leads me neatly on to another important issue: marketing. The blog phenomena is a bit like the early 90s with the dot.com boom, where everyone wanted to get a website and make a million. Then everyone got a website and not everyone made a million.

I don’t have any ideas on how to make a million (and if I think of them I won’t be posting them here!) but I believe that when it comes to marketing blogs authentic communication is the key phrase: and that we can approach the blog from the inside out in this regard. A bit like that naff baseball film with Kevin Costner Field of Dreams where he remarks sagely ‘if we build it they will come’. It also reminds me of an interview I did when I was a freelance journalist for the World Service with the author David Lodge on how new writers could get published. ‘Merit will find an audience’ he said, and the phrase has stuck with me.

So my approach to building an audience is a grass roots one – we can comment on other blogs (if we really mean it – otherwise we might get a rep as a ‘comment whore’!), link to blogs we like, encourage dialogue and participation on our own blogs, link to other stories on blogs that we read, notify online networks and forums when we get started and try to create our own friends and family networks, tell people to check out our blog on our FaceBook wall, post useful information so that people come to our blog as a knowledge hub and tell people we meet in pubs and launches and lunches etc about the blog to spread the news word of mouth. Then when our own extended networks, real and virtual, are exhausted, we can also sign up to Blogger Directories like BritBlog and get techy with trackbacks, pings and RSS to syndicate news and updates.

‘What happens if I type ‘blog’ into Google?’ one of the students asked. ‘How can I get my blog to be high ranking?’ Search engine optimisation is an alchemical art practiced by online marketing agencies who know how to find the Holy Grail – at a price. I did research this question further after class though and duly typed ‘blog’ into Google. Dilbert did well, as did Google’s blogger services and Wikipedia. The Wiki entry also included data on FLOGS or FLOGGING short for fake blogs – which are principally blogs created to look like they are written by real life, unpaid, bloggers by advertising and PR agencies.

For my own part, having an entry on London Estate Agents helps – as does reference to specific areas: I was amazed as I monitored my stats page – which allows you to see what search engine terms have been typed in – how visitor numbers rocketed. I now have a new core following of readers who are looking for one bedroom flats in Loughborough Junction.

I have posted up a page on Marketing Your Blog as a reference here which covers some of these issues in more detail. WordPress also has a good guide in its FAQs on how to attract more readers. Oh, and some of the blogs on the sidebar here – particularly the high-traffic ‘famous blogs’ – also include tips on how to build and keep your audience.

Now I’m off to try and create some authentic content by taking photos of yellow stuff for my Bring Back the Sun Campaign that is currently running on Blag Lady. Toodlepip!

The Way We See It

Last night we went to Kingsway for a photography session. We met at a cafe opposite the World Service and did an exercise responding to images. We also talked about the potential for using image on the blog as a medium and how imagery impacted on our writing and creativity.

Then we headed off in our different directions and regrouped an hour and a half later.

We all go a few shots we were pleased with. We also decided on the homework for this week:

1. Upload your Top 5 images (you can include as many as 10, but try and find 5 you are pleased with at least) onto the blog you are using for the Urban Bloggers course.
2. Number each image and caption.
3. Take a look at other people’s blogs and by commenting, vote for the Top 3 images.
4. Review the responses you get, and then upload your offering to The Way We See It.
5. The Way We See It can be accessed via the sidebar.
6. DEADLINE: 16 July 2007.

So, here are mine!

1. Blurred yellow car!

2. Yellow Jack
3. ATM Box

4. Yellow lie
5. Sandwich Bar

6. 7. Fast food joint

8. Birthday cards

9. RTM

10. Yellow Triumph

Catch Up

Last night Leila Segal came to talk about her blog Ola Hadasha.

We discussed why Leila started blogging and how it feeds in to and nourishes her creative purpose and practice. We also talked about how Leila created her audience and how she interacts within her blogger community. As somebody blogging about the Middle East she is in a busy and politically charged zone: what Leila strives for is to transcend political biases and bring an attitude that acknowledges the moral and emotional complexities of her environment.

Ola Hadasha is not written as journalism, but rather, as she puts it, a mix of poetry, or poetic language and documentary. This led us to discuss some of the inherent aspects of the blog as a medium: its immediacy, the lack of narrative prescription – one post does not need to follow on from another in terms of story although of course it can – and the opportunity for further creative expression through the use of image and photography.

We also touched on:

• The relationship between place and content: how where we are affects what we write
• Issues around our moral responsibilities as writers
• How the blog allows far greater editorial freedom and with that freedom more personal responibility in terms of what we choose to publish
• Anonymity and exposure: how ‘safe’ or ‘vulnerable’ are we as writers when we push ourselves towards truth?
• Understanding and writing to our audience
• Creative integrity and our purpose as bloggers
• Reading: who do we read? Who do we link to? Who might link to us? Links as reciprocal promotion, commenting and dialogue.
• The blog as a tool for social activism and reconciliation in conflict environments

I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say it was fascinating to hear Leila talk about her work and process. So, many thanks Leila for coming in.

Next week we are out and about on Kingsway for a photography session. Please bring a camera, your notebook  and pen. We will meet at 6.15pm at the Italian cafe opposite the BBC World Service, Bush House on the corner of Kingsway and Aldwych. (I will pop down there at some point and get the name, and also check opening hours etc. I will post any further details or changes to the rendevouz by next Tuesday, so please check in to Urban Bloggers.) The nearest tube is Holborn.  Please be prompt as we will be here, there and everywhere.

I will post homework in a separate document.

Karen

Blogging from the Edge

Hello,

Just to remind you all to read through as much of Leila Segal’s blog Ola Hadasha as you can before the session tomorrow evening. Leila writes about the issues around Israel-Palestine from a personal perspective and runs peace education workshops through creative writing.

She is coming in to talk to us about ‘blogging from the edge’ tomorrow evening. If you do not have time to read all the blog – then please make sure you’ve read the following posts:

Her first post

HEBRON + Comments

False Dichotomies

as these are various turning points she experiences.

As dialogue created through comments is an integral part of the blogging experience for Leila please try and read the comments too.

You can access Ola Hadasha through the sidebar. It is listed under Blogumentary.

I Heart London Estate Agents

London estate agents sting. They are not bees but wasps. The only honey is the honey trap. They do not die after the sting but rather come back and sting you again. O praise these resiliant and resourceful creatures who are loved by none.

I remember young Marcus after we went to see a ‘beautifully presented’ flat near the ‘hub of Brixton town centre’. On the way in the little path up to the front door was clear. On the way out it was littered with a fresh syringe. ‘You’d better get rid of that,’ I advised, somewhat smugly. Marcus duly kicked it under the privet and clicked the remote to open his Mini Cooper: ‘So, shall I book you in for a second viewing?’ he called back over his shoulder. They can have such a dry wit.

London estate agents are ever so discriminating and can be surprisingly subtle in the way they express it. Emily, a thin girl with blond hair scraped back into a ponytail and liberally applied foundation is not atypical. ‘Of course you’ll get more value for money somewhere like Loughborough Junction,’ her face morphs into a toffee apple brittle smile. ‘Although of course, it is, well, very,’ here she pauses and almost catches my eye, ‘diverse.’

So you see, they really are very modern and up to date. They know all the right phrases. Corporate Social Responsibility, even, is not beyond their ken. Foxtons’ ubiquitous estate agent signs now carry advertising for local school fetes. Supporting the community in which they operate is high on the agenda.

The best property agents live in gated development penthouse showflats with slightly grubby off-white sofas. This is very considerate as there is no better way of sorting wheat from chaff.

Thatcher’s Children have come of age. Estate agents are their super furry mascots.

Catch-up

Hi All,

This is a note for those who joined in the second week and would like to catch up. Last week we discussed what people wanted from blogging, what stage they were at, and what they wanted to get out of the course.

We also looked at aspects of journal diary writing, referencing Samuel Pepys and the blog of his diary, along with Random Acts of Reality, a high-traffic blog by London Ambulanceman Tom Reynolds. Specifically we looked at language, and the continuing narrative and how intimate aspects of their lives unfolded through the text. In Random Acts we also looked at a specific entry Oh Bollocks which details an HIV scare.

The homework was to write the following two posts:

How to be a Londoner and 3 things I love/hate about London

and to read through Urban Bloggers, take a look around, find a site you liked and review it. I will post the full homework as a separate document. I also asked people to spend time reading all our Urban Blogger blogs and to comment. Please send through your site address and I will add you to the Blogroll (list of blogs on the side panel).

Yesterday we explored London as a literary ‘character’ and how writers interacted with the city in their work, looking at the opening of Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. We were looking at language, description and characterisation of the city and how literary writers achieved this. We also read through and discussed an article about writing about London by Zadie Smith which can be accessed via the sidebar.

I gave a group warm-up exercise which was to spend ten minutes free writing on the FIRST TIME YOU SAW LONDON or remembered realising you were in London. I also suggested you include one or all of the following words in the text:

Brillo, amethyst, coffee, pigeon, boom.

We then moved on to image and text and specifically we looked at the photographer Stephen Gill’s website and his pictures of Billboards, Hackney Wick and Hackney Flowers. This time our focus was on theme and frame: how we view the city and its people. A representation of a hidden London. Working beyond stereotype.

Finally we worked on uploading images as detailed in the handouts.

I will post this week’s homework in a separate document.

Last week’s homework is available via the sidebar.

Thanks for coming and I look forward to seeing you again at 6.15 (prompt) next week.

Karen

Welcome to Urban Bloggers

Welcome to Urban Bloggers. This is a resource blog for the Spread the Word course. London will be our theme and inspiration over the next six weeks. I will be posting notes, updates and homeworks here and linking to relevant and interesting sites as discussed in class.