Rev Dan Catt
Sporadically posts from someone who still does occasional 'blogging'
Geo-Personalised Data Newspaper, aka The Postcode Paper #newspaperclub or How I’m always late to my own party.
[Crossposted from geobloggers.com (because I can't make up my mind)]
Tom Taylor, Gavin Bell and I made a newspaper but more on that in a moment.
Considering everyone who reads this blog would have seen this already, I could just point you at the Newspaper Club’s own blog post: Data.gov.uk Newspaper, or this post over here: Postcode Paper: What you can do with the right data or even the twitter search for newspaperclub, and you’ll know all you need to know, however, I’ll tell you the most exciting bit …
… well … the 2nd most exciting bit was waiting for it to arrive. The most exciting bit was when it did arrive.
We had just 2 days to plan, figure it out and throw it all together, and a deadline of 6pm on Thursday night. You see that deadline is the important part, because we needed to show it to people on Friday. By getting it finished and sent to the printers by 6pm Thursday, it’d get printed early on Friday, a courier on a motorbike would whisk 50 copies from the printers to us for 11am in the morning.
They were, literally, hot off the press. If by literally we actually mean quite cool. Quite cool off the presses doesn’t have the same ring though.
That’s the excitement of waiting. You know they’re printed, they exist, somewhere they take up real physical space, real physical space possibly traveling at 65mph.
The really exciting part is where you get to rip open the plastic wrapping and hold the thing in your hands, turn the pages … it’s like a real, real thing, that’s really real.
Which is, in short, pretty awesome.
Ok, the “more on that” part:
When I say “Tom Taylor, Gavin Bell and I made a newspaper” what I really mean is “Tom Taylor and Gavin Bell made a newspaper”, I’m still settling into my new job (that I’ll blog about sometime, honest!) and only had a small amount of free time between meetings. I threw together The Allotments bit …
… that I then emailed over to Tom to be added to the paper.
The map is from OpenStreetMap, and the tile set is the “Fine Line” style from CloudMade. The Carrots marking the Allotments were positioned from the geo:rss data in an XML feed from www.london.gov.uk/allotments
Anyway, the whole point was to make something useful, something that could combine a whole bunch of government and local data together, that you could cut out and stick on your fridge … something that’s not effected by IE6 … last time I checked newsprint wasn’t effected by IE6, but frankly it wouldn’t be a surprise if it was.
So how did we do?
Well, this was a quick stab at playing with Data.gov.uk, which involves a lot of SPARQL endpoints. Firstly SPARQL ain’t the easiest thing to get to grips with in a couple of days. Although as more people play with it tools will get written and knowledge shared.
If that was the only stumbling block then all it would need is more time thrown at it and, with Newspaper Club’s leet skillz something beta-ish could probably be up and running fairly quickly.
However there’s still 2 things, 1) Need more data. Data.gov.uk is a great start, we just need more of it, like everthing, but I’m sure we’ll take what we can get as we get it.
2) Location, location, location. The big one.
We needed to convert Postcode to Council/Government areas. Because when people are asked for their specific location, address (house number, Postcode) is about as specific as they can get … not many people, bless ‘em, know their lat/long. However see this post: Blah blah blah, whatever for the current government response to freeing up the Postcode.
And when we have the Postcode we need to nail that down to some council authority area, but, the UK is a funny old place and as I’ve previously mentioned it’s full of areas like “Duke Elligton’s Marginal Lower Land Barrows of the Kidsworth Council Academic Elective Mobile Library Region” otherwise knows to the Ordnance Survey as OLK12.
WTF?
And all that’s locked away between The Royal Mail and The Ordnance Survey. Although near the end of the day Simon Willison discovered a CD with, in theory the Postcode to Council area lookup tables on.
Which is, to go off at a tangent, in essence one of the big problems with Digital Britain. The theory goes that The Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey have too much locked up in their data, they’d have to say something like “I know, we’ll unlock all our data, that’ll cause us to instantly wipe £3.5 million [made up big number] off our spreadsheets”.
But, the value to (Digital) Britain of unlocked this data, allowing small companies, big companies, individuals, projects like NewspaperClub to use, re-purpose, publish, develop, share, integrate is worth way more in the long run.
The Postcode Newspaper is a great, fantastic idea, but it’s going to be held back, along with other great, fantastic ideas. Data.gov.uk will generate a lot of ideas, but moving the whole country forwards, really unlocking useful information that actually helps real people … well that’ll just have to wait just a little bit longer.
WTF Photo by schoschie
Geo-Personalised Data Newspaper, aka The Postcode Paper #newspaperclub or How I'm always late to my own party.
Tom Taylor, Gavin Bell and I made a newspaper but more on that in a moment.
Considering everyone who reads this blog would have seen this already, I could just point you at the Newspaper Club’s own blog post: Data.gov.uk Newspaper, or this post over here: Postcode Paper: What you can do with the right data or even the twitter search for newspaperclub, and you’ll know all you need to know, however, I’ll tell you the most exciting bit …
… well … the 2nd most exciting bit was waiting for it to arrive. The most exciting bit was when it did arrive.
We had just 2 days to plan, figure it out and throw it all together, and a deadline of 6pm on Thursday night. You see that deadline is the important part, because we needed to show it to people on Friday. By getting it finished and sent to the printers by 6pm Thursday, it’d get printed early on Friday, a courier on a motorbike would whisk 50 copies from the printers to us for 11am in the morning.
They were, literally, hot off the press. If by literally we actually mean quite cool. Quite cool off the presses doesn’t have the same ring though.
That’s the excitement of waiting. You know they’re printed, they exist, somewhere they take up real physical space, real physical space possibly traveling at 65mph.
The really exciting part is where you get to rip open the plastic wrapping and hold the thing in your hands, turn the pages … it’s like a real, real thing, that’s really real.
Which is, in short, pretty awesome.
Ok, the “more on that” part:
When I say “Tom Taylor, Gavin Bell and I made a newspaper” what I really mean is “Tom Taylor and Gavin Bell made a newspaper”, I’m still settling into my new job (that I’ll blog about sometime, honest!) and only had a small amount of free time between meetings. I threw together The Allotments bit …
… that I then emailed over to Tom to be added to the paper.
The map is from OpenStreetMap, and the tile set is the “Fine Line” style from CloudMade. The Carrots marking the Allotments were positioned from the geo:rss data in an XML feed from www.london.gov.uk/allotments
Anyway, the whole point was to make something useful, something that could combine a whole bunch of government and local data together, that you could cut out and stick on your fridge … something that’s not effected by IE6 … last time I checked newsprint wasn’t effected by IE6, but frankly it wouldn’t be a surprise if it was.
So how did we do?
Well, this was a quick stab at playing with Data.gov.uk, which involves a lot of SPARQL endpoints. Firstly SPARQL ain’t the easiest thing to get to grips with in a couple of days. Although as more people play with it tools will get written and knowledge shared.
If that was the only stumbling block then all it would need is more time thrown at it and, with Newspaper Club’s leet skillz something beta-ish could probably be up and running fairly quickly.
However there’s still 2 things, 1) Need more data. Data.gov.uk is a great start, we just need more of it, like everthing, but I’m sure we’ll take what we can get as we get it.
2) Location, location, location. The big one.
We needed to convert Postcode to Council/Government areas. Because when people are asked for their specific location, address (house number, Postcode) is about as specific as they can get … not many people, bless ‘em, know their lat/long. However see this post: Blah blah blah, whatever for the current government response to freeing up the Postcode.
And when we have the Postcode we need to nail that down to some council authority area, but, the UK is a funny old place and as I’ve previously mentioned it’s full of areas like “Duke Elligton’s Marginal Lower Land Barrows of the Kidsworth Council Academic Elective Mobile Library Region” otherwise knows to the Ordnance Survey as OLK12.
WTF?
And all that’s locked away between The Royal Mail and The Ordnance Survey. Although near the end of the day Simon Willison discovered a CD with, in theory the Postcode to Council area lookup tables on.
Which is, to go off at a tangent, in essence one of the big problems with Digital Britain. The theory goes that The Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey have too much locked up in their data, they’d have to say something like “I know, we’ll unlock all our data, that’ll cause us to instantly wipe £350 million [made up big number] off our spreadsheets”.
But, the value to (Digital) Britain of unlocked this data, allowing small companies, big companies, individuals, projects like NewspaperClub to use, re-purpose, publish, develop, share, integrate is worth way more in the long run.
The Postcode Newspaper is a great, fantastic idea, but it’s going to be held back, along with other great, fantastic ideas. Data.gov.uk will generate a lot of ideas, but moving the whole country forwards, really unlocking useful information that actually helps real people … well that’ll just have to wait just a little bit longer.
WTF Photo by schoschie
