Sheffield Online - Where to look and 'Sheffield Made Us'

Where are the best places to go for information, news and opinions about Sheffield as a student?

A city with two universities, a massive student population and a revived, thriving cultural scene. So what are the best websites, blogs and twitter feeds to follow for Sheffield?

An exhaustive list would be pushing anyone's abilities, so I'll highlight the best I know - but please let me know of any other suggestions!

Sheffield Blog, of course, deserves a mention. With fairly regular updates it should be the online starting point for anyone coming to the city, including students. Be it bands, events or flash mobs, Sheffield Blog manages to cover most major events. It may not tell you all the latest news or about the politics of the city, but it offers interesting pieces on the past and particularly on music. Also has a useful map of free wi-fi hot spots in the city.

Most importantly, Sheffield Blog also has a considerable list of Sheffield Tweets, be they bars, university departments or local government.

For my part on Twitter with regards to Sheffield, I follow:
@FUSE_forgeradio (student radio)
@sheffielduni
@unsheffield (which was a creative and digitial industries conference which took place earlier in June)
@clicketyclicks (a student-run photography company)
@shftelegraph
@Forge_Media (student website and paper, the feed for which I helped set up)
@filmunit (student film society which presents films at the union for a very reasonable price)
@sheffieldunion
@sheffieldblog
@nick_clegg (who is also MP for Sheffield Hallam)

Obviously Facebook remains the primary organising tool for students in the city, as with any UK university. A brief history: facebook first hit Sheffield in 2006, when I was in my first year in halls. I joined in around March, and within a year it's coverage was pretty much complete. I get the impression it grew into an essential in Sheffield much faster than other unis.

Now, students are on facebook years before they come to University. Student-wise, I could name one person I know who isn't on it.

It's become essential for organising committees, events and for anyone running in student elections.

Having said this, that doesn't mean there aren't other useful sites for Sheffield. The Sheffield Union site highlights all the goings on, be they the latest campaign or club night.

With any luck, the Forge Today website, which was revamped this year, will become the focal point for student news in the city. Its potential is massive but it will require real commitment to be successful.

I've also found Sheffield Daily Photo an interesting take on the city. Barely a month old, it posts a photo a day from the city, sometimes taken with little more than a camera phone on the way to work. But the author manages to show unusual angles of the city and gives some history about buildings that you wouldn't give a second look to. You can follow them at @sheffieldphoto.

I'll confess to another reason for this post. It's a build up to a project I'm hoping to do. The University is running a competition, called 'Sheffield Made Us'. You can see a video about it through the link. It's a competition to make a video about the following:

How has the University of Sheffield helped you to Discover and Understand? Record a film showing us how your experiences at the University of Sheffield shaped you and you might walk away with £3000 - roughly equivalent to a year's tuition fees!

'To Discover and Understand' originates from the University motto Rerum Cognoscere Causas or, 'To Discover the Causes of Things' from Virgil's Georgics II, 490.

I've got the skills, I've got the software, and my have I got some ideas about this video. It's a maximum of three minutes long. How can I tell you about the city and the University in that time? Wait and see.

-For more of my photos of Sheffield, I've got a set of them on Flickr:

In defence and explanation of Twitter

Following some debates on my course at the University of Sheffield, I thought I'd write a brief defence of Twitter.

From Peter Cole to Ed Roussel (his Twitter feed is here) and of course everyone on the course, it's been a few days of debate about Twitter.

Firstly, it's not simply for telling people what you are doing 24/7, everyday. In the case of Stephen Fry, public figure and national treasure that he is (and one of the foremost technology reviewers in the country), thousands - 177,371 in fact - want to know what he is doing. But for most people, in most situations, it isn't the case. For me, it exists for 3 reasons:

Breaking news
BreakingNewsOn is one of the more popular Twitter feeds, with nearly 25,000 followers. It offers, in effect, a breaking news wire and it will soon establish a full news feed. I have seen stories appear there before they do on CNN or BBC: the Hudson river crash and the Mumbai attacks included. I've never seen them subsequently have to retract a story.
In addition, members of the public can tweet on news events - plane crashes, the Hudson river crash, even the snow in the UK. For journalists and news organisations, this is a good way of seeing how the public are reacting to an event, either over time or as it happens. The ability to post pictures also adds to this (first picture of the Hudson river crash), as does the easy ability to update Twitter from your phone simply by SMS.

Linking
Using tinyurl, which shortens any url, Twitter can be used to link to blogs, news items, photos - any website in effect. This allows it to act like a blog or web-page linking to other websites, be it through self-promotion or admiration and interest in others work.

Conversation
Twitter is not there to replace Facebook, MSN (if anyone uses that now) or live online chats. What it allows is a simple, uniform platform where it is possible to respond, promote (or 'retweet') to others. It's not just for normal individuals either. Pressure groups (the NUS) think tanks, student unions, politicians, world famous authors like Paulo Coelho, even the University of Sheffield law department all have Twitter feeds.

The downsides
As pointed out to me by Ben Hazell of the Telegraph earlier today, Twitter is far from perfect. Many of the applications, such as searching what people are tweeting about, are provided by third parties. It has had bug problems. And, indeed, it is almost impossible to make money out of the service.
Twitter should be seen not as something that is replacing journalists or media organisations, but as a tool, like Google, they can exploit to attract new users, to network and to find out more analysis and news - you choose what you want to here about.

And just so you know, you can find me on Twitter here.

I'll be writing a fuller post about convergence week later. You can see Helia's, Rich's and Jasmine's comments on the week on their blogs.

The next term of a postgraduate journalism degree at the University of Sheffield

After the NCTJ law tests and the ethics essay, it's time for the next semester in my MA Web Journalism degree at the University of Sheffield.

This term, I'll be doing more Web Journalism, undertaking a convergence project across the disciplines (print, broadcast, web, magazine) which essentially means I'm doing broadcast training for the next week. I'll also be studying governmental systems and regulation in the industry, and a module under Herman Wasserman (his blog here) on Journalism, Globalisation and Development which I'm really looking forward to.

Beyond this, I'll keep writing and editing for the Forge Press until we hand over to the next team. Hopefully the new website will be up soon, and the backlog of Comment articles will be up. I hope to set up a Twitter feed for the newspaper/website soon. We've got the Union elections coming up, which I was involved with in a big way last year and will be reporting on this year.

What else this term? I'll be applying for work experience, doing a UN writing competition, looking into organising a debate on the media and going a trip to London to PMQ's.

I plan to re-invigorate the blog with new applications and to de-clutter it a bit. I'll be setting up a new website where I can bring together my blog, Twitter, Flickr and other sites into one central point. I also plan to set up a new blog on the media, politics and news in the Middle East, which will be connected with the aforementioned development module.

On with the course!

US Election Night in Bar One, Sheffield University Union of Students

I've helped to organise a US election party in Bar One, at Sheffield University Union of Students tonight. We've got the bar open until 5am with drinks served until 4, offers on American drinks and American food, a bucking rodeo and BBC and CNN on the big screens, should be a great night!
See how many people might be coming to the event here...

Kudos to the Politics Society, the American Society, the Union Finance Officer and of course Bar One for helping to organise the night.

On a personal note, I'm glad it's going to be over. It's a fantastic distraction. The analysis, from bloggers, news sites, friends and papers is so great one could never get all the perspectives on this election. Watching and reading about it though, as been an absolute fascination. I remember hearing the radio come on in January, in what seems like an age ago telling me Obama had won the Iowa caucas. We've been through the primaries, the controversies, the conventions and it now comes down to the American voters with the eyes of the world watching.

It is the most analysed, most commented on and most anticipated election in history.

Roll on tonight.