Yesterday MySociety announcedMapumental, a new service designed to help you plan your life better using the wealth of public transport and travel information available across the UK.
Mapumental is the culmination of an ambition mySociety has had for some time - to take the nation’s bus, train, tram, tube and boat timetables and turn them into a service that does vastly more than imagined by traditional journey planners.
I don't normally blog about specific BBC projects or work that I'm involved in on the 'day job', you can catch all of that information on the BBC Internet Blog.
However, as my recent trips to Canada (photos pending) and Cornwall have left me feeling very out of touch with the online world then what better way to start the ball rolling again than with a response to this excellent post from Matt Deegan on the current design refresh of the BBC's local websites.
Matt is correct, the local sites are going through a refresh this year which is allied to a migration of the sites onto the same content production system that has been used for some time for the BBC news and sport websites.
Currently only Bristol, Norfolk and South East Wales are live with the new templates but we aim to achieve a full roll-out by the end of the year.
There are many good points in the post relating to the presentation of content and information relating to the local radio station for Bristol on the site. I think we'll be taking quite a few of them on board as we continue to develop the visual design of the templates! (thanks Matt)
It's worth pointing out that we have very recently put our local radio programme information into the BBC Programmes system which delivers schedule and programme information integrated with on-demand and live listening via the BBC iPlayer.
It's a complicated set-up and we undoubtedly haven't yet got the perfect balance between delivering on-demand and live audio via the iPlayer, schedules via the /programmes site, and local news and information on the BBC Local website.
And there's plenty of work to do on finding the best way to visualise this wide ranging variety of content, with it's associated set of BBC brands, without presenting a multi-coloured swap shop style experience to our users.
We want a website that appeals to listeners of the radio station, but we also want to deliver a local BBC service to all license fee payers that live in the Bristol area, irrespective of which radio station they listen to.
Olly Benson and Nick Wallis have commented on the regulatory restrictions around what a local BBC web service can provide but I still believe there is much that we can, and should, do.
So in answer to Matt's original question, Have the BBC just given up on local radio websites?, my answer is absolutely not, but it's a more complicated solution than providing a website for the 162,000 people listening to BBC Bristol on 94.9 and 103.6 FM.
The Guardian has today launched Open Platform with the hope of freeing up their data and allowing users to build other tools and services using Guardian content.
Of particular interest is the work on a crowd-sourced solution to geo-tagging.
"Stamen and OpenStreetMap developed a service that they hope will encourage Guardian readers to "geo-tag" the newspaper's content, positioning every article, video and picture on a map so users can find news, commentary, video and other content related to their area.
The Guardian experimented with geo-location during last year's US presidential election, and hopes the project will help add location information to its vast archive of content."
Diane Coyle, BBC Trustee and Chairman of the Strategic Approvals Committee, said:
"The Trust is committed to improving regional and local services from the BBC for licence fee payers but a broadband-only local video news proposal is unlikely to achieve what they want.
"Instead, we believe the BBC's priority should be improving the quality of existing regional services. We recognise that the ways of achieving this may vary in different parts of the UK. We have asked the Executive to come back to us with new proposals later this year which will then be fully scrutinised by the Trust.
Sky News sees 'opportunity' in regional news websites Press Gazette reports that "Sky News is exploring the possibility of launching a series of regional websites around the UK to complement its national TV news channel."
Google launched it's own Fire Eagle today, enabling you to 'See your friends on a map and get in touch'.
I haven't had enough time to get properly stuck in but from first viewing the Google Latitude user experience is more map-based and the 'sales pitch' is much more end-user focused.
Whilst all the hype around Fire Eagle was it's ability to be the 'glue' between applications, storing, retrieving and passing on location information, Google Latitude seems to be promoted as an application that will directly help you organise your real world existence by knowing if your friends are nearby, if your parents' flight arrived safely, and so on.
They are essentially the same thing in a different package.
I guess the next technological breakthrough will be a device, small enough to put in your pocket, that will include an audio speaker and receiver set such that, upon entry of a particular numeric code, you will be able to converse directly, one-to-one, with anyone else with a similar device.
Then you could find out, not only if your friends are nearby and if that flight arrived safely, but how everyone is feeling, whether they saw the game last night, and if anyone fancies a beer? Oh, hang on... (photo: Olib)
From a business point of view it makes a great deal of sense for Google to be pushing heavily into this area.
If the great Google machine knows the whereabouts of you and your friends, and builds an understanding of your travelling habits, then, together with all of the other information Google already knows about each one of us, just imagine the kind of powerful, relevant advertising model that could be created for each individual.
Putting sarcasm and cynicism aside for one moment, my major tech prediction for 2009 was thus:
"Determining your present location will become a seamless and automatic feature on mobile devices, enabling some breakthrough location based services to achieve widespread popularity."
Google Latitude is yet another step in the right direction, although they might want to launch an iPhone version fairly soon.
For more information, here is Google's introductory video explaining their new service:
A 'digital kitemark' to differentiate quality journalism from 'the noise of the web' should be introduced, according to a new report published this week.
“A digital kitemark… would identify and differentiate professional journalism amidst the noise of the web,” the report says.
In my experience websites are already pretty good at providing this differentiation already.
As for suggesting that the "noise of the web" is inferior, that somebody enthusiastically producing content because they are interested in the subject matter is somehow not as useful or interesting as somebody who has been paid money and told by their boss to write some words on this subject.... huge generalisations I know, but I think somebody might have missed the point somewhere along the line.
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