b29 under water

just a quick post to note the floods; the river rea is all over the Selly Park playing fields, with water flowing from Kitchener Road onto them - when we took a look a few hours ago, water was geysering up in the middle through the manholes.

The Bournbrook broke its banks just by Pebble Mill and flooded 3rd, 4th and Sir John's Avenues, and the Pershore Road was flooded at Pebble Mill and Cartland Road.

Here's a video of the river at the bottom of First Avenue:


I took some more pictures, but not of the avenues flooding; I felt like it wasn't very helpful for the people whose houses were disappearing underwater to stand around and take pics of it ... but loads of people did have their cameraphones out so I'm sure there will be lots of pics.

More floodwaters (apologies for the terrible camera angles):


Looks like it's stopped raining, so fingers crossed.

*UPDATE*

Sadly, the water kept rising - the bottom halves of Hobson and Kitchener Roads and Cecil road were really badly flooded, with water levels up to people's thighs. Fashoda Road was half flooded, and you couldn't drive up DogPool lane - there was a fire engine at the junction with Fashoda doing what it could.

The waters did start to subside around 5ish, but that was little consolation for the people whose houses were submerged. One of our neighbours reckoned it was by far the worst flooding for 20 years... and there's more rain forecast for Tuesday with the fallout of hurricane Gustav :(.

Sharing B29 places ...

I've been looking at B29 on a few location sharing sites (is there a better collective name for location-based social networking sites? I'm sure James knows...), most of which seem to suffer from being based in the US, clunky UIs and/or too few users.

One such site is streetadvisor.com, with just two whole Birmingham entries. It struggled to find my street - insisting that I live in Water Orton. I've never been to Water Orton, so I guess it might be nice, but I definitely don't live there. The map interface is relatively friendly, however, with the kind of slideable google map overlaid with widgets that's become the norm, so I eventually found my street which streetadvisor insisted is in Bournbrook. pfff.

Once you've located your street, the site invites you to rate it on a variety of scales including retail opportunities, provision of health services and schools and availability of gas. This feels like it might be a useful tool for people looking to move somewhere, but I can't really see what would motivate users to add their street .. or am I missing something? Would you want to showcase your street? Would the pre-defined categories help, or would you rather praise your street in your own words?

Mobile social networking is the latest start-up frenzy with a whole smorgasbord of sites popping up. Brightkite had a lot of industry buzz, and it's got a nice interface, and puts B29 roughly in the right place. The focus is on knowing where your pre-existing friends are, rather than on reviewing or discovering stuff. Again, it suffers from a lack of other users - at the time of writing, no-one else is within 4,000 metres of me :(.

With Rummble, the focus is on sharing info on physical locations and reviews with your pre-existing network, so in theory you get "trusted" local info. Over at Plazes, you get more of a microblog+location feel - it's more about discovering who's around and what they've tagged rather than local reviews. Plazes just got bought by Nokia, and they've got an API to enable developers to extract and reformat the info that people add, which implies the site will be funded for some time ... I'll award zkout the honorary gratuitously stupid 2.0-esque name award.

The common problem with these micro-local sites is that their usefulness won't become clear until they've achieved a critical mass of users - which is much more of a challenge on a small local scale than across a much more generic user group. Stiff competition also implies a lot of market churn - the likelihood is that different local groups will champion different micro-local sites, so it's difficult to see the business model working, at least in the short term while sites fight it out for market share.

Anyone found a good location sharing site? Or should we just stick to a huge mashup of individual google maps?

Here's the only one I've found so far for B29 - quite juggling-specific ;)


View Larger Map

If you've got a lovley B29-specific map, let me know and I'll add it in ...

Map of B29

In case you were wondering, here is the B29 area in full detail (click on map for larger image).