Locatum

Its now a post new condemnation dawn, the dust is settling, the fractures clear for all to see, the first signs on the walls.... Hyperlocal...means.....different things to different people and while Mr Gale makes a valid analysis on its application as it relates to the aggregation and delivery of location specific content Gary's Hyperlocal Bloggage , there is a sense that the term has achieved a level of common usage, certainly amongst certain areas of the politico-digerati, and is due a critique at a different, less technically oriented level that is less awed and self-reverential than seems to be currently the case. To cognoscenti hyperlocal is used as a catch all term in relation to an ecosystem that embraces data and information (and opinion), collates, aggregates and in some cases analyses or comments on that information and a mechanism by which these parts are published and distributed (online but not necessarily). Critically advocates anticipate that this ecosystem stimulate...

Recently some scummy type swiped a camelia and pot plant off our doorstep while we were out, probably on Easter Sunday; we live a long way down a cul-de-sac, there are plenty of people around washing cars, twitching curtains etc including our neighbourhood watch fellow and at least one police officer. About the only thing this little enclave gets in terms of 'strangers' are speculative white vans looking to trim trees and sort out your driveway. Yet no one saw anything (I have asked). OK, so sometimes s**t happens. Since around Christmas our same street has been benefitting from a local government policy (or pilot more likely) that turns out the street lamps from midnight. Fantastic! Saving energy, diminishing that bane of our lives, light pollution, opening up the sky at night, what's not to like. I am old enough to remember when street lights did just about enough for you to see the post they were attached to and to drive down unlit motorways in an old opentop enjoying...

...from the publishing of the government's response to the OS Consultation. They caught us on the hop with the changes to OS Free but we still managed to have OS maps for free ready for All Fools sunrise. Much has been made (including by me) of the hostage to fortune set by GB back in November regarding the timeframe for the outcome of the consultation, made worse by the delay of its release til 23rd December. Well, they've got away with it so to speak and the indecent haste is well papered over in the document itself, though at first glance the meat is rather lean with plenty of promised downstream engagement to flesh out the true meaning. It is evident from the foreword by John Denham (well, signed off by him) that what some of us long suspected, i.e. the need to offer, in the form of a long overdue OS Free portfolio, an answer (or a sop?) to the nagging Free our Data campaign as well as assorted nay sayers, trolls and self-proclaimed freetards (oh, and TBL, new hero to No....

While I tend to regard myself as generally pro-technology and pro-science I find I also have a long and deeply held anti-GMO 'position'. Glyn Moody's recent post on the subject reminded me of this and stirred me to ponder this view. In essence you can take it as a given that I am as deeply suspicious of the corporatism so ably detailed in Glyn's (and Andrew Leonard's) post as they are. If you're not then pretty much any scientific/technical objections are going to fall a long way second. A very good friend of mine worked for a while in a unit within the EC that amongst other things used to test for the presence of GMOs in various crops both in field trials and on the dockside. In a purely statistical sense a negative presence (even in parts per billion) does not disprove the null hypothesis regarding whether or not the sample is 'contaminated' by GMOs. This is depressing enough as we know that field trials of GMOs always leak into the surrounding env...

Apologies for so much grammar in the title but those of you who have been following this since November 17th will know exactly whence the implied skepticism comes. In the intervening months you may have observed (as I have not been 'anon') various comments I have made to various posts and other blogs (I can't remember them all now so no links!) correcting factual errors and establishing a soap box of sorts from which to contrast and/or challenge in a "you can't prove that your emperor has any clothes" kind of way some of the statements, demands and assumptions of the 'georati' (?). Now of course you may argue that I, on behalf of emapsite, have an agenda of my own, what with being an OS Premium Partner (that's value adding reseller) and all. You may be right and I am not going to be sharing corporate information here so you'll just have to speculate but on the whole you won't find me hiding behind some smoke-screen of nobility and social g...

Well, technically, boy 2 (aged 9) and my better half. Rather a last minute decision (last week) saw the rapid creation of a team (of 2) - http://www.mysportrelief.com/jedstars?SID=118239 and a modest fund raising target. Delighted and grateful for the immediate response. And today was the day, at 1030am allegedly - I say allegedly....the school car park was home to what appeared to be an amateur motorcycle display team; happilty we did have the right day, just the letter and original website time had been wrong and the whole thing was scheduled for 3pm. Not content with running 3 miles later boy 2 then played football and tennis for over an hour. Back at the school and self consciousness took over during the 'warm up'. But come the off and boy 2 was running 4th of some 200 souls after the first 400m as they left tarmac for grass and mud. Each circuit a mile with many finishing after one circuit boy 2 strode on, revivified after 2 miles, as the picture shows, to finish the 3...

Had the iphone a month now and am a total convert - how can anything else be so difficult and lacking in intuition!? Still not done much in the way of Apps for myself - SnowReport, WindGuru, TideApp, GPSLite, Ship Finder, Eurosport, Palringo, Twitterific, Skype, Trainline, TubeMap, Tube Status and mashup ASBOromoter demonstrating a combonation of interests if nothing else. On that note, what is the excitement with the ASBO thingy? As with the bike mashup it begs the asking of more, serious questions than it can hope to answer. Perhaps that is the point, go and look at it yourself, examine the metadata (its not s**t by the way, it is just worthy and dull and, per a discussion of the use of digital signatures, vital to provenance, confidence, trust, re-use etc). All for that but in the meantime it certainly doesn't provide social value or as the contrarians might have it, create/perpetuate ghettoes. Anyway, back to the iphone.....yes, I have a password, no the boys don't know ...

You regular readers will know that I don't put much public relations related material on this blog; however, I do think you will be interested to know that our mapshop now has a plug-in free map interface for the first time. Back in 2000, yes 10 years old this week too, so we see it as a kind of celebration, ERMapper's Image Web Server and the underlying ecw format and its accompanying protocol (ecwp://) opened up the possibilities of an e-commerce data delivery platform. Yes, it required an ActiveX plugin but boy did it change the way in which geographic data, particularly mapping and imagery, could be viewed and obtained. Then 5 years or so ago we launched a Java based solution for viewing large scale (notably OS MasterMap) data online and for completing planning applications and similar things for PDF output. More developments here shortly too. Although IE remains the de facto browser across the vast majority of users in the enterprise space this is changing, fast in som...

Statistics was compulsory when I studied geography, maybe it still is, but it is dull, worthy, grey and complicated which means that few labour over the minutiae of sampling methods, aggregation units, timelines, confidence intervals, error and so on. Too many shades of grey for politicos, lobbyists, media and the hobbyist too. So what happens in the mashup, in the creation and consumption of information, the thirst for knowledge and some degree of certainty? Both producer and consumer can define and divine intelligence in their mashup and the chosen analytical methodology (though few would think in those terms). And so we have it, a few producers, a myriad consumers, a willing public, a naïve one, ripe for gulling. It is an interesting area…. We are in the arena of filters, choice architecting, framing effects and the tools of cyber balkanisation - data through a lens, information of the providers making, online. The often self-referential, self-reinforcing nature of this information...

At a recent presentation a slide was put up using PSI made available through the MPDP initiative that ranked local authorities according to the %age of potholes (again, I know) repaired. So Torfaen, with 3 reported holes, all fixed, came out 'top' and then the slide changed. Does that make Torfaen the best council in Britain? Does it mean they have fixed all the potholes? Does it mean the repair will last? Did we know where Torfaen ranks in the passenger kilometre travelled per day charts (I made that one up but you get the idea)? Flipping that table around does it make whoever is at the bottom the worst? Of course not. Where does our money go indeed, and on what justification? What are the underlying statistics, the hard facts, that drive decisions, be they central, local or further devolved? Are there any (think WMD here!)? What process has been used to say yes to potholes and no to something else? What problems are we trying to solve? How do we measure the relative v...

This may end up being a multi-part piece as various strands come and go in the struggle to create a coherent thought piece on a topic that has been nagging away at me for some time. Yes, it has relevance to geography and location and even to free data and mapping but the underlying motivation derives from a wider philosophical question on the use and impact of data in a hyperlocally enabled globally interconnected world…..bear with me! So, where to start without being glib or contrarian or wading in the soup of euphemism, the pejorative and the broad brush…… Whether we like it or not, and personally I do, in Britain we live in an incredibly diverse and broadly tolerant society. And yet, and yet…..the manufactured doubt brigade (typically in a ghetto of some kind, whether of the mind, the middle class or the migrant), the furious ignorati and their cohorts in the media, willing and otherwise, chip away at this diversity and tolerance. We also live in an inter-connected and inter-depen...

Meanwhile out in rural Berkshire at Gran #2, my own mother's Fiesta sits abandoned. And, apparently there are similar Fiestas in the same situation all over the UK with some 20+ in one dealership in the Borders if sources are correct. The problem? An "EAC fail" message is the electronic accelerator control system fault warning but it can often flag a code in the main engine management self-diagnosis system too. Once you work out what to type into Google you get loads of results (for example, honest john #1 , honest john #2 , ford_fiesta_common_problems_and_solutions , askabout #1 , SA Ford Owners , another one , just answer #1 , just answer #2 , just answer #3 , just answer #4 ). It is possible to deduce from this jumble that Ford or at least Ford dealers appear not to have a clue about this issue and its impacts on owners; where information may have been circulated to attempt to deal with it they appear incompetent in either finding that information or working through...

When these things happen to you or those you hold dear you somehow hope that they will turn out differently and that the anonynous powers that be that hold the health, security, wealth and happiness of your nearest and dearest in the palm of their hands will turn out not to be as in so many conspiracy theories, consumer magazines, fellow blogs et al. You hope, with no great confidence it must be said, that the reassurance offered by these global brands will deliver your relatives from the frustration, undated and anonymous letters, obfuscation, contact ping-pong and other quasi bureaucratic devices deployed to delay, depress and deter those who are actually their customers. The architect of Sears-Roebuck's rise to become a great retailer was Julius Rosenwald, who once remarked, "My ambition is to stand on both sides of the counter at once." We strive for that; would that these others would do the same. The overlapping stories of the mother-in-laws begin aorund the same...