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 this data the map view refreshes to display standard Google pin-points to illustrate stories nearby.

The above screenshot is the result of searching for a minimum of 5 stories nearest to Bristol from the last 7 days.

The fifth nearest news item that appears on the map is actually located in Portsmouth, nearly 100 miles from Bristol, so it's not exactly a local news service - but then ITN is not a local news provider so it would be wrong to expect too much content at this level of granularity.

However, the amount of content appearing on the map still seems a bit thin for a news provider such as ITN - presumably due to the number of news items that are not being geo-coded as they don't relate to a specific point on the map.

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) in its collection.


Maps courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps used with permission.

On the surface this appears self-explanatory but on closer inspection it is confusing, even misleading, that the white areas are labelled in the key as "No Data".

This doesn't really help provide a true picture of the world situation given the amount of white space on the map.

A more colourful, and complex, representation of the world's financial state is provided by the Helsinki University of Technology's Self Organizing Map (SOM). 39 quality of life indicators (from 1992) were used to compare countries and graphically align countries with similar characteristics.

In colour coded form it looks like this:-



And in more conventional map form it looks like this:-



There were plenty of other images returned via Google but nothing that really offered me anything of interest or made me feel that I was learning anything new.

Then I came across www.povertymap.net, a website aimed at "Promoting the use of poverty maps in policy making and targeting assistance, particularly in the areas of food security and environmental management."

Unfortunately the section that used to contain selected examples of poverty maps has been removed as the site owners have "not been satisfied with the quality of the entries, nor the technical implementation of the database." If nothing else it is refreshing to see this level of integrity on the web.

Something quite different is the London School of Economics' Charles Booth Online Archive which offers a fascinating insight into poverty mapping in the 19th Century.

The Maps Descriptive of London Poverty are perhaps the most distinctive product of Charles Booth's Inquiry into Life and Labour in London (1886-1903). An early example of social cartography, each street is coloured to indicate the income and social class of its inhabitants.

The lowest classification level, A, is indicated by the colour black on the map and is described in detail as:

The lowest class which consists of some occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals. Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink

Poverty has always existed. There will always be a range of wealth and quality of life within any population group, however big or small. In this sense there will always be poverty, there will always be some people less well off than others.

But gaining a better understanding of the situation, educating all of us about the cause and effect of poverty, and encouraging more people to look for ways to narrow the gap, to help those less fortunate, is becoming increasingly important in the world today.

Improving access to the underlying data and finding much better methods of visualising this information might just help this education process... maybe, just maybe, mapping can play a role.

There are plenty more poverty maps on the web, here are just a selection of my recommended links for further reading:-

• The World Bank guide to poverty mapping.
• The Global Poverty Mapping Project.
• More on Charles Booth.
• Rural Poverty Portal - World Poverty Map.
• UNICEF - The State of the World's Children 2005.
• BBC News - Child Poverty in the UK.

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 playing with the five different tools available I found myself hooked on the EscapeMap feature.

Simply enter your starting destination and a broad idea of where and when you want to go and up pops a Google Map with details of destinations and cheapest available price.

Clicking on a destination provides further details of the cheapest deal with the option to click through and further specify your travel to that destination.

Further filters above the map let me decide what type of holiday I'm after (beach, shopping, history?) and further specify location and price.

The other tools on offer, CombiFlight, CheckFlight, MyAirline and FlexiFlight are all attempts at providing a more distinctive online travel service but don't really go far enough in my opinion and don't feel very different to the websites I'm used to.

EscapeMap is not perfect, it still requires quite a lot of time and effort to assess what my options are and doesn't really provide the answer to my original question, "is it not possible for me to ask for some holiday suggestions departing from Airport X on date Y, returning on date Z, and to view a list of destination options?"

It is a step in the right direction though, and a great, simple and effective use of mapping tools on the web... more please.

Trinity Mirror launches local wiki website

Coming hot on the heels of their Liverpool Echo news map, the Trinity Mirror have launched a wiki site for the North East of England.

The website, www.wiki-north-east.co.uk, is aiming to be "a collaboration of editorial articles and user generated content for and about the people, places and events of the North East."

Read an initial analysis of the site on the Online Journalism Blog.

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 service across our regional sites with our editorial content geo-tagged and pinpointed to postcode level bringing our brands ever closer to our users and this is live in a public beta today on the Liverpool Echo."



A few smaller examples of this approach have been around for a while - most notably the SE1 News Map - but this is the first major news publisher to try this map based approach.

A quick look at the story tags suggests there are 541 geo-tagged stories on the Liverpool site from the last two and a half months - and that presents something of a design and usability challenge to present this volume of content within a single map window on the web.

Update: Journalism.co.uk looks at where the rest of the UK local/regional news providers currently are in the geo-tagging game.

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 a fancy new running watch with built-in GPS.

I know all of this because afterwards I plotted my run on the Gmap Pedometer, a very simple Google Maps based application that provides all the information above and more, and lets you save your run to a unique URL for future reference.

View a larger screenshot of my run for better detail.



My struggles with bending fiddly pieces of string along faded roads on badly folded, torn-but-sellotaped paper maps are well in the past and for the last 6 months or so this website has become invaluable.

A shining example of a well-executed, simple but extremely effective tool that delivers exactly what is required.

Although it does mean I can no longer pretend that I've run further than I actually have!

* I don't believe that I did burn 937 calories. More to the point, I've really no idea how many calories I did burn but I do know that the Gmaps Pedometer has no clue how fast I completed my 6.6306 miles, it only knows my body weight and distance completed.

Maybe a combination of distance, body weight and time would allow a more accurate calorie calculation but for all this website knows, I could have gone for a gentle stroll this morning ( I promise it wasn't a gentle stroll!).

** It is particularly good news as I am training to run two half-marathons in one week in October and raising money for the British Heart Foundation - feel free to sponsor me if you wish.

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 be overlayed to compare data visually. For example, to see a map of the London Underground overlayed on top of a map of population, go to the search page and enter the keywords "tube" and "population". Then click on the two relevant maps to add them. They will be displayed when you click on "View".

The maps themselves are not stored on the server, but only a link to another site on the Internet where the map is already published. When maps are shared, information about what the map is and what it shows is entered by the owner and this is stored on the server along with the link to where the map is published. The raw data is never stored on the Internet as the maps comprise the pre-rendered tiles made by the GMapCreator, so this is a safe way of sharing a map without giving away the raw data used to create it.

The BBC (my employer) has used the site to run a couple of user surveys on issues such as the credit crunch and anti-social behaviour and then display the results on a map.

As a simple tool for creating choropleth maps - where the data is gathered by a defined geographical area - it seems to work really well.

Overlaying multiple maps is a bit more fiddly but I can see how it could be a very rewarding feature of the site.

Some of the combinations I tried were hard to decipher and added no real benefit but as the site develops and the number of shared maps increases this should improve - and being able to easily send a link to your newly created combined map is good news.

One suggestion. More often than not, the complexity of the Google maps foundation layers are too detailed and distracting from the data layers.

Using simplified base layers or providing a fade function as in Ordnance Survey's new UK Election Map service would be a good move.

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 display corresponding maps. MapMyPage also provides hyperlinks to relevant content with every map including directions from Google Maps, bird's-eye views from Google Earth, photos from Panaramio, weather from Weather Underground, articles from Wikipedia, news from Google News, events from Zvents, concerts from Gruvr, activities from Viator, trips from Kayak, travel books from Amazon, travel information from WikiTravel, real estate listings from PropSmart, jobs from Indeed, classifieds from Oodle, web search results from Google, blogs from Google Blog Search, videos from YouTube, radio stations from Radio-Locator, TV listings from Yahoo TV, gifts from CafePress, and auctions from eBay.

A comment on AllPointsBlog points out that this feature is available in Internet Explorer 8 which is all well and good, but I use Firefox and I'm sure many other people use different browsers to IE8. A simple web app, that can be customised and coded into pages, has to be the way to go for allowing people to incorporate the functionality into their own content.

So does it actually work?

Well, let's try a few examples and see what comes up:

In my life I have visited Exeter, London, Nottingham and Devon but I have never been to Bangor in Wales or Bangor in Northern Ireland.

In this simple test it has worked fairly well with straightforward towns/cities of a reasonable size.

A number of usability issues around the small size of the pop-up window and having all of those text links squashed into the pop-up bubble. It also took me a while to figure out how to get rid of the map window as well (you simply click outside the window!).

For Nottingham, the initial view is much too zoomed in and I had to zoom out to check that I was actually looking at Nottingham.

Exeter worked much better in this respect and London was generally ok although a few times the zoom level was different and a small number of times I clicked on London the image on the right popped up.

Not really what I would expect of a map depicting the location of London!

Countries suffer from a similar problem with Wales and Northern Ireland represented by a point somewhere near the middle of the country - but the map so zoomed in that it's hard to make out where you are.

Devon, a county in the South West of England, didn't even trigger a response from the application.

Using Bangor was a bit like asking a trick question - although it does highlight one of the common problems with simple geo-tagging solutions like this... many places have the same name. This is how wikipedia copes with the problem. Using MapMyPage the Northern Ireland instance appears and the Welsh option, and others, are ignored.

I also experienced a number of broken links or links to un-related content when clicking on the items in the pop-up for the country items. Exeter however, a decent sized and uniquely named (in the UK at least) city, proved much more successful in providing relevant content.


So, in my brief look so far (and it has been a brief look) I think the idea behind this is really quite cool and I'd love to see it developed and improved further, but definitely some work to do around the design/usability of the map widget and in finding solutions to some of the more complex issues of geotagging and referencing location data.

ITV Local adds crime information

More activity from websites looking to improve their coverage of local crime information.

This time it's ITV who are launching a crime section on ITV.com, tying crime data and related news to the eleven regions in the ITV Local network.

ITV is working with the charity Crimestoppers to add crime information to the site in the form of 'most wanted' posters, an archive of crime video reports and a user-generated crime reporting feature - so if you spot anyone vandalising something (or worse) you could post the evidence to the site. (Wouldn't it be better to send it to the police?)

From PaidContent:UK.

Everyblock experiments with council meeting minutes

Tom Loosemore recently posted about the ability to search video footage from House of Commons debates on theyworkforyou.com, pointing out that:

The accessibility and searchability of the web transforms our ability to hold our elected representatives to account for their actions in Parliament.

Now hyper-local news mapping site Everyblock has launched in two new US cities, Charlotte and Philadelphia, and is testing some interesting new information sources which have the potential to take this accountability another step forward.

Everyblock Charlotte will be providing access to relevant information within city council meeting minutes and Charlotte zoning minutes (NB: Zoning rules regulate how land can be used. Landowners must get city council approval to develop property in ways that do not conform to current zoning classifications.)

Everyblock Philadelphia will be publishing information from the Philadelphia Rules committee (The Rules committee considers matters relating to municipal development and zoning, the city planning commission and housing and redevelopment authorities, among other things.) and Philadelphia Streets and Services agendas.

We're analyzing the text of these meeting minutes/agendas for all locations referenced therein. If the city council or rules committee mentions something near you, you'll see it on your EveryBlock page. This is often highly relevant local information about zoning changes, etc.

Planning applications (or 'zoning changes' in US speak) have always been a great example of ultra-local information that are extremely important to the (usually) small number of people that they affect.

By making this information easily accessible, as well as a host of other related data around local services and civic issues, these sites could well lead the way towards a truly essential, ultra-local service.

Managing large sets of un-structured data, and making them easy to use, searchable and relevant is not an easy task and the location tagging and location based search mechanism will be crucial to the success of the project.

Everyblock Charlotte also includes information on 911 calls to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (maybe the ultimate information resource on crime mapping in your area?) and notice of any new books and DVDs that have been added to your local library.

More information on journalism.co.uk.

Media coverage of the BBC Local Video PVT

Here is an updating list (thanks to the miracle that is del.icio.us) of links to media coverage of the BBC's application to provide a local video service on bbc.co.uk.

(Disclaimer: I am involved in this application as part of my day job at the BBC.)

The PVT began on 24th June 2008.

BBC Trust begins public value test into local video proposal

The BBC Trust has today started its public value test (PVT) of the BBC's local video proposal.

(Disclaimer: I am involved in this proposal as part of my day job at the BBC.)

The Trust has published BBC management's application as well as supporting documents, a service description and a full timetable for the PVT.

Details of the public value test (PVT) process can be found here.

Ofcom have also issued a press release on their market impact assessment consultation.

You can read the proposal on the BBC Trust website and any interested party is welcome to submit their thoughts as part of the public consultation - the deadline for responding is 5pm on 22nd July.

ITV Local has 4 million video views in May

Media Guardian reports that ITV's web video figures rocket.

ITV Local, which offers news, weather and entertainment content to different regions, recorded four million video views in May.

The four ITV regions where video has taken off the most are Meridian, which accounted for 16% of views, Central at15%, Anglia with 11% and London at 11%.

ITV's London region saw the biggest month-on-month growth for May recording a 50% boost in video views.

These numbers in the context of "12 million views of programmes or clips on ITV.com in May" - although it's not clear whether the 4 million to ITV Local are included in the overall 12 million or not.

If this is the case then it would seem a solid endorsement of the value of local content on the web, particularly given that the overall figures for ITV.com are led by such high-profile output as Coronation Street, Britain's Got Talent and Euro 2008 football.

Huffington Post goes local

From Media Guardian article - Huffington Post starts local news push.

The Huffington Post is planning to expand into local news across the US, founder Arianna Huffington said last night, beginning with a site edited for the community of Chicago.

Huffington said the Chicago site would aggregate news, sports, crime, arts and business news from different local sources as well as contributions from bloggers in what will be the first of a series of projects in "dozens of US cities". The Chicago site will initially be curated by just one editor.

Maybe it's a reflection of the popular discussion topics in Chicago but I found it interesting, and slightly amusing, that the proposed content is listed as "news, sport, crime, ..."

Lessons learned from hyperlocal

While we are on the subject of news becoming 'more local', here's an interesting post from Rob Curley on the experience of running the hyperlocal project LoudounExtra.com, developed by Washington Post Newsweek International.

"...I thought the two biggest problems with LoudounExtra.com were poor integration of the site with washingtonpost.com and not enough outreach into the community … ala basically me speaking with every community group that would have me."

Northcliffe re-vamps local websites with geo-coding on stories

Northcliffe Media have begun geo-coding stories produced on their "thisis" websites as the group prepares to introduce geographical targeting on the "next generation" of local news websites.

The 10 remodeled sites, including thisiscornwall.co.uk, are part of the plans to re-vamp the 55 existing sites and to add 35 new regional websites under Northcliffe's 'thisis' brand, by September this year.

Unfortunately the localisation functions are not currently visible, but should be available in a few months when there are enough geo-coded stories available to support the service.

This is a shame, and potentially missing a trick, as enabling users to watch the service develop from the ground up might have provided the opportunity for useful feedback on how the stories are being tagged.

Robert Hardie (Northcliffe content strategy director) has highlighted the difficulty in knowing how to tag an individual story with suitable location data - seemingly postcodes in this case - to ensure it is found in the right place by the right people.

In my mind the success of the service will depend on two key areas, neither of which is easy to get right:

1\ How flexible can a journalist be in tagging a story? Can multiple postcodes be associated with the same story if it affects multiple areas? Can a group of postcodes be used to illustrate a story is relevant across a whole region? How much granularity does the postcode tagging allow - postcode area/district/sector/unit?

2\ How will the visual design of the site allow users to access this content? The same questions apply as in the point above, but this time relating to the user. Can I search for stories purely on my street? Or across a wider area? And how will the editorial prioritisation of a big news story be reflected if I am searching by location rather than by size of story or time of publication?

I guess we'll have to wait a couple of months to find out!

From the Press Gazette coverage:-

The new sites' geographical targeting functionality will allow users to enter a postcode to find all the stories on the site that affect them. The localisation functions will remain hidden until journalists have built up enough stories with postcode data.

“It should only take month or two until we’ve built up that bulk of stories with postcode data attached to them,” said Hardie.

Because not all stories affect only one specific point, the company is finding geocoding challenging, Hardie said.

He said that while a traffic accident might affect only one location, a story about bed-blocking in hospitals would affect people over a wide area.

“On the one hand it’s opening up a major opportunity for us, but it also means we’re going have to learn new skills and make value judgements about how we tag stories with postcodes,” Hardie said.

“It’s a new skill that we’re going to have to get used to doing very cleverly,” he added.

The story is also on journalism.co.uk and Media Guardian.