Jon, photo by Andrew Cookson

I work as a freelance social media and multimedia consultant and producer, and also write and blog on a wide variety of topics. I can help you get to grips with using the social web to your best advantage, be it blogging, social networking, video, podcasting, or using tools like Twitter.

At /blog you’ll find my thoughts and things I’ve found useful or interesting by way of “how people use the internet”, or other social technology.

I use WordPress in a lot of projects, its powerful CMS and focus on web standards, and usability make it ideal for many dynamic web projects.

I’m an experienced internet producer, creating and managing websites for the last ten years.  I spent nearly four years working for the BBC designing and building interactive displays and film. I’ve also worked as a commissioning editor, and author on multimedia design books, and as a journalist.

 

Most recent blog posts:

Are MPs happy?

And don’t worry this isn’t going to be a rant about expenses.
At Moseley Barcamp I gave a presentation about ‘conversational psychogeography‘ and the potential for an explosion in data analysis of emotions and place. It was a very broad overview and I continually admitted that real research needed to be done (I’d love to do [...]

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Local Government — does the ‘Government’ bit matter?

I had a smashing time at LocalGovCamp on Saturday, so thanks to Dave Briggs and the organising team — and everyone that came and embraced the unconference aspect of it. As someone who does a lot of work around how people organise themselves around place and area I often come into contact with Councils and [...]

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Will Perrin on Digital Britain

Someone I did get to talk to at the Digital Britian was Will Perrin of Talk About Local — a new project to : ” give people in their communities a powerful online voice.  We want to help people communicate and campaign more effectively and influence events in the places in which they live, work [...]

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Recent Projects

Big City Plan Talk
Big City Talk– is a unofficial consultation portal developed to help people understand and discuss Birmingham City Council's Big City Plan. I designed and built the site and with a team of volunteers translated the official consultation document into plain English. It has been noted as a successful model for online consultation. See more.

The Big Picture – a large public art project from Arts Council England West Midlands. Consulting as Online Editor I managed strategy and content for the Big Picture web presence.

“It was a real pleasure working with Jon on The Big Picture… a never-ending source of inspirational new ideas for how we could make the most of the digital potential of the project…and produce[d] great results. His creativity, knowledge and enthusiasm contributed hugely to the success of the project and I hope to have the opportunity to work with him in the future.” Caroline Griffin. See more recommendations on Linked in.