Obviously I'm not condoning this law breaking act in any way, but should you be inclined then new website Please Rob Me will be just up your street.
By gathering information from location aware online apps and posting twitter updates from people who are willingly advertising the fact they are not at home, a list of 'opportunities' presents itself.
Seriously, would you put an advert in the local paper saying ‘I’m leaving my house tomorrow at 10am and won’t be back for 3 hours’ or such like?
I’m guessing the answer is no, yet plenty of people are quite happy to do the equivalent online in the name of being social, or playing a game. It really does beggar belief.
"While researching developments at the grassroots of community journalism, I've been impressed by the range and depth of coverage from local websites and blogs. This experimental project reflects both the shifting nature of journalism and the reality on the ground."
The successful candidate will be a confident blogger, know their yelps from their tweets, have a passion for local news and understand how to build relationships with the local community. A journalism qualification is desirable but not essential.
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 important and we think this is a really interesting growth area.”
Very interested to see how this compares with Trinity Mirror's beta news map in Merseyside which has improved since it's launch last year but still does not feel very user friendly.
Geo-tagging news content is a really complex task and presenting this on a map defies the usual logic of consuming news in order of importance, can't wait to see how Microsoft tackle this.
Robin Hamman (@cybersoc) and I spent many an hour talking through this type of aggregation during his time at the BBC, primarily as method for BBC Local journalists across the UK to work more effectively with the local bloggers and active websites within their patch.
Sadly we never got past the talking part which is why it's really great to see something like this finally come alive, hooray!
Northcliffe and its digital arm Associated Northcliffe Digital have begun the roll-out of its ambitious plans for a network of hyperlocal websites.
The new platforms will be evenly distributed between areas with existing Northcliffe titles and those which are not served.
The sites are intended as platform for the local community and not as a traditional community news site, said Bryan, who said the network would be complimentary to the existing thisis network of regional news sites.
"What we are trying to do is to deliver a network of local sites that are aimed at providing local people in quite small communities a place and a space online to debate local issues," he added.
The sites look nice enough (See Exmouth as an example) and tick all the cliched boxes of current web design... a homepage segmented by round-cornered components, the ability to create a user profile, a twitter/facebook-esque status update, plus the standard newspaper diet of motors, properties, jobs and classifieds.
My concern is that the site already feels very busy and driven editorially by the desires of Northcliffe. There also seems to be very little recognition or attempt to integrate these sites with the existing blogs, websites, profiles of web active people already in the area - surely a key element of getting a foothold in any local community.
If you want to help local people in small communities get involved in their local space on the web then my hunch is that the Talk About Local approach has a better model.
Talk About Local is aiming to "empower 3,000 people directly in 150 places across nine English regions with a focus on the most disadvantaged areas." by offering free advice, training materials and support to anyone who wants give their community a voice online.
Talk About Local plans to work with UK online centres to give people the coaching and skills they need to use simple publishing tools such as popular free blog platforms.
4iP'sDan Heaf outlines the two main reasons for funding the project on the 4iP blog.
Firstly, it stimulates alternative voices bringing fresh perspectives to the web. This project is all about giving those without a voice online a chance to get themselves heard. With the emphasis on creating local sites we hope the majority of the sites will be local in flavour helping to fill the gap being left by the retreat of traditional local journalism.
Secondly, by giving voices to local activists the project continues to hold those with money and power to account. Again we hope this will take up and enhance the job once done by local newspapers.
Reading all of this made me think of BirminghamB29 which I started almost two years ago and has been gathering pace of late due to the attentions of pindec and citizensheep in particular.
There's nothing particularly "activist" about the B29 site but as an experiment in local publishing it proves that a truly local site, covering an area small enough to walk around in a few hours, will be of greater relevance and interest than most of the supposedly "local" services offered by the more traditional media.
In fact, my favourite learning from BirminghamB29 site is just how much there is to investigate, to write about, and to get out there and do, in such a relatively small area of the UK.
4IP and Screen West Midlands are making a major investment in Talk About Local to create hundreds of new community websites by giving community activists the simple skills
I hope that the T.A.L. team don't get overly hung up on the negative, almost political, focus that the 'community activist' tag suggests.
Often the power of a community lies in it's ability to have fun, to play together, and not simply when a group or individual feels that something needs to change.
...and I still wish that the ridiculous use of the phrase 'hyperlocal' could be banished forever! It's not hyperlocal, it's just local.
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."
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.
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.
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:-
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, MyAirlineand 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.)
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.
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.
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, ..."
"...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 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!
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.
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