James Thornett The views and opinions expressed here are my own and not those of the BBC, my employer.
Mapping
The 2010 World Cup in maps
I’ve spent too much time watching the World Cup in recent weeks to really post anything on here – what better way to get moving again with a look at some of the maps used in web coverage of the tournament in South Africa. The BBC (Disclaimer: I work for the BBC, although had nothing [...]
Location Business Summit – Day 2
No blogging this morning as I was busy presenting a view of location services at the BBC and then speaking on a panel discussion. Thoroughly enjoyable, and the best panel discussion yet according to @uphamb. Follow #locbiz f you want a rundown of events so far. Now back to sitting, watching, listening and blogging. Joel [...]
The Location Business Summit, #locbiz – Day 1, 28th April 2010, Amsterdam
Some highlights from day one of The Location Business Summit in Amsterdam. Annette Zimmermann from Gartner began the conference with some analysis and survey results on the usage of location services. Unsurprisingly it is expected by 2014 that a third of mobile phones in use will be smartphones – i.e. phones capable of delivering location [...]
Using maps on news websites
Paul Bradshaw posted some thoughts yesterday on the use of maps on news websites, a subject often discussed on this blog. Most recent ‘highlights’ are discussed such as MPs expenses, although Mapumental from MySociety is not listed, nor is my favourite longstanding example of a local news map, the London SE1 News Map. There is [...]
Microsoft to partner with local newspapers for MSN Local News Map
Microsoft, through their MSN Local portal, are hoping to provide local news on a map, in partnership with local newspapers across the UK. Peter Bale, executive producer of MSN, said: “We are hoping to take feeds from local newspapers and tag every piece of information to a map. Hyper-local news online has never been more [...]
Setting the power of postcodes free
Ernest Marples Postcodes Ltd, whoever they may be, are encouraging you to use their free API to geocode your UK postcode data, with a plea to the Government and Royal Mail to make this ‘official’. Sites already using the service include:- Jobcentre Pro Plus — Search for jobs in your area PlanningAlerts.com — Get alerts [...]
MySociety unveil Mapumental
Yesterday MySociety announced Mapumental, a new service designed to help you plan your life better using the wealth of public transport and travel information available across the UK. Currently in private beta (you can register here) the application has been built with support from Channel 4’s 4IP programme. Take a look at the video: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVZkHuomqfM] [...]
MP Expenses Map
With all of the recent attention focused on UK Mp’s expenses it’s no wonder that a number of maps are appearing to help browse the data. One of my favourites is this one using MS Virtual Earth created by Shoothill.
Google Street View in the clear
Following protests and complaints over the introduction of Google’s Street View technology in the UK, the UK’s Information Commissioner has today ruled that it should not be stopped. A spokesman for the privacy watchdog said removing the entire service would be “disproportionate to the relatively small risk of privacy detriment”. More from BBC News.
Residents complain over Google street view cameras
Another story from BBC News today on the privacy issues surrounding Google’s Street View technology – residents of Broughton, near Milton Keynes, staged a protest and accused Google of invading their privacy and facilitating crime. Twenty five UK cities went live on 19th March with the Netherlands version also going live on the same date, [...]
Lessons to learn from the BNP map
Details of over 10,000 members of the UK British National Party appeared in the public domain after a former member supposedly leaked the list online. Links to the data were made highly visible on sites such as Digg.com. Then a Google map mash-up was created – zoom in to find the BNP member in your [...]
Me and my running, 2008
Judging by my training record for 2008 so far (and I doubt there will be significant improvement in the remaining 7 weeks of the year) I’ve got some way to go before I’ll be writing my own version of Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Mileage on the vertical axis, this [...]
ITN puts news on the map
Following Trinity Mirror’s experiment with the Liverpool Echo, journalism.co.uk has reported on ITN’s use of Google Maps to provide users with geo-located news stories. The simple interface currently allows you to specify a minimum number of stories, a central location point and a time period over which you are interested in news content. Upon entering [...]
Mapping and poverty (Blog Action Day 2008)
The 2008 theme for Blog Action Day is Poverty, a subject that hasn’t been out of the papers in one form or another for a long time. I thought I’d start with a fairly obvious Google image search for “poverty map”. Geographic.org appears to come up trumps with the fairly straightforward World Poverty Map (2000) [...]
How to plan your next holiday
After I published a post on my personal blog about the lack of decent tools on the web to help plan a holiday a friend pointed me in the direction of Opodo’s new AirTools service. It’s not quite the complete answer but it’s certainly heading in the right direction. Within a very short time of [...]
Trinity Mirror launch beta local news map
As reported by The Guardian, Trinity Mirror have today announced the launch of a map-based local news service on their Liverpool Echo website. Chief Executive Sly Bailey said that the service was a follow-up to the development of a series of hyper-local websites across the group. “As a next step we’re launching a map-based news [...]
Going for a run?
This morning I ran 6.6306 miles. The first mile was very much downhill but the 6th mile was a very steep uphill climb. During the run I burnt 937 calories*. This is all good news**. What is even better news is that I know all of this information without having spent a single penny on [...]
Google maps gone wrong?
Google Maps is now exclusively using TeleAtlas as it’s mapping data provider, dropping all previous information supplied from NavTeq. This appears to have resulted in a noticeable increase in errors according to reports from The Map Room and The Earth is Square.
MapTube: Create, combine and share your data on maps
Seeing a recent post from The Map Room reminded me that I had neglected to finish an earlier post I had started about MapTube, a website for sharing maps created with the GMapCreator software, released by University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). The main principle of MapTube is that shared maps can [...]
Internet Mapping causing ‘long term damage’
From BBC News -> Internet mapping is wiping the rich geography and history of Britain off the map, the president of the British Cartographic Society has said. Mary Spence said internet maps such as Google and Multimap were good for driving but left out crucial data people need to understand a landscape. Mrs Spence was [...]
Google investigating strange trees
Stinky Journalism goes into the detail of how this poor attempt at cloning in Photoshop could be very damaging to the reputation of Google Maps – issues of accuracy and trust etc. The prospect of well done, difficult-to-detect photoshopped photos taking over Google Maps – as opposed to the amateurish tree cloning exhibited in the [...]
New web application to add contextual mapping to your website
MapMyPage is a new web application that allows you to add contextual map information for any locations mentioned on your web page. An explanation of how it works is on the site: MapMyPage uses its own proprietary technology in combination with MetaCarta’s GeoTagger and the Google Maps API to identify locations in web pages and [...]
I spotted a Google Street View car…
… and, like Jon, I found it strangely quite exciting! The sight of seeing the car driving through the streets of Birmingham did make me ponder one question which I hadn’t really considered before. With the increased awareness these days around climate change and the damage we are doing to the natural world, are Google [...]
Mapping the Caribbean
A £10 pledge and one hour spent mapping features from Yahoo aerial imagery will give you a 60-1 shot of being sent to a Caribbean island on behalf of OpenStreetMap to complete a map and spread the open-source word. Well, it might do. The deadline is 30th September and 44 people have already signed up [...]
