OpenStreetMap, an organisation that is using consumer technology to create copyright-free maps, is meeting this weekend (5-7 May) on the Isle of Wight – to map the whole Island and give the data away under a Creative Commons license.
Driven by a united belief that mapping information should be free, the thirty plus volunteers gathered from the Isle of Wight, the wider UK, Germany and nine from Norway will be gathering their GPS kits, and taking themselves around the Island. They’ll be heading out in cars, on bicycles and on foot to explore the diamond-shaped, 22 x 14 mile island, covering the 147 square miles (381 square km).
“The Isle of Wight is a manageable size, one we believe can be mapped over the space of a weekend,” said Nick Black one of the co-ordinators, “Not only will the roads be covered, but the walkers plan to get as many of the footpaths mapped as possible too. This is a group effort.”
Once the GPS data is combined with notes of road names taken via audio recordings or even notebooks (shock horror), accurate mapping data will be put into the OpenStreetMap system for all to share. Quite different to the huge cost that the Ordnance Survey (OS) is asking for similar data.
Why so expensive?
We’ve always been unsure why the cost of licensing the maps of the UK is so prohibitory expensive. How much? Well according to the BBC TV show QI, the full Ordnance Survey (OS) map data of 2002, the most detailed map of Great Britain, sells for £30,000 for every town, or £4,099,000 for the whole country” (ref). Ouch!
Let’s be clear about this, UK tax payers money has been and is being used to collect and collate this data, but UK citizens and businesses are charged to use it. The Ordnance Survey argument is that it needs the money to maintain its high standards of mapping, employing around 350 surveyors as they do.
Strange, but we’ve not noticed the UK randomly shifting around during the night, so they’re clearly not remapping daily. What they are doing is seeking to obtain a 20cm absolute accuracy for their large-scale data. This will then be sold on to those who can afford it.
It’s not just commercial organisations that have to pay for accessing such information. On a parallel track, look at postcode and address information. As Charles Arthur and Michael Cross pointed out in their article in the Guardian, local authorities often collect much of this information and then have to pay to access that self, same information.
A local authority such as Swindon has to pay OS £38,000 a year to use its addresses and geographical data. It also has to pay the Royal Mail £3,000 for every website that includes the facility for people to look up their postcodes. Yet it was local authorities, which have a statutory duty to collect street addresses, that collected much of this data.
If you’re not submerged in this world, it may surprise you to find out that the United States actually gives its mapping data away for free. So through agents like Navtec, and Teleatlas, it ends up on applications like Yahoo & Google maps. Innovation like that isn’t possible in the UK as it falls at the first hurdle – that of huge expense.
We’re proud that we’d been knocking the same Isle of Wight idea around the Digital-Lifestyles offices for a while now. Our thinking, it’s such a perfect, containable location for technology experiments. It’s an area where trials can be carried out, proven, then expanded to wider areas.
Wake up and smell the technology
Here’s the stark reality – technology in the hands of enthused members of the public is changing for ever the business models in many areas. Movements like OpenStreetMap will succeed in mapping the UK.
Not only that but access to their data will be better that the current the OS offering. It will include additional information that the public has contributed such as photo’s, audio recordings, text descriptions, etc.
Organisation like the OS who do not let their data free will be be left clutching hold of something whose value has been severely diminished, if not zero’d.
Come and join in
Previously thought of as a sleepy backwater, the Isle of Wight is under going a renaissance, with an explosion of musical and artistic talent in wide abundance, much of it concentrated on a Victorian town called Ventnor (disclosure: We love Ventnor).
We’re going to be there and if you fancy a weekend travelling around a beautiful Island, then get in touch with OpenStreetMap via their wiki. There’s still time to get yourselves there and help change the world (a little) for the better – one step at a time.
OpenStreetMap, Isle of Wight Workshop
OpenStreetMap
OneMap – Norwegian project
The Isle of Wight
Search engine big-boys Yahoo have unveiled a shopping site for consumer electronics backed up by expert advice and user-contributed reviews.
The magazine-style site will use Yahoo’s tried and trusted community tools to help users find information about products and prices and share their opinions with friends, family and other consumers.
Content
The new Yahoo! Tech is currently focussed on the U.S. market, with Houston saying that there are no imminent plans to expand into other countries.
Proof that podcasting is moving further into the mainstream comes with the news that MP3 players from mobiBLU will be shipping with preinstalled software designed to download podcasts with just one click,.
With a wagging finger and nodding head, Russell Holliman, founder and CEO at Podcast Ready sighed, “There is a huge perception that podcasts are for Apple users only, and if you’re not using an iPod it’s a difficult process.”
The appropriately named mobiBLU Cube is, at 0.94″ square, one of the smallest in the world and comes with a large OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) display.
In an attempt to grab a bigger slice of a music download market currently dominated by Apple’s iTunes, Napster is letting users gorge themselves on the 2,000,000+ tracks in their bulging catalogue. All for free.
The freebie web-based service uses a Flash application to provide a basic music player interface along with windows for album art and the inevitable advertising.
Gorog believes the boom in online advertising will pay dividends for Napster’s new advertising-supported business model, noting that their website currently averages 2 million visitors a month.
Channel 4 is offering a UK online exclusive of the entire first series of the cult hit show, Lost.
You’ll have to be quick to watch the new series online though, as episodes one and two will only be free to view for two weeks (until May 11th 2006.)
Obsessive fans hoping to work out the dark complexities of the series by analysing each show in infinite detail will be disappointed to learn that it’s only possible to watch episodes for a 24 hour period on a single PC before the pesky thing goes into auto-destruct,
Lost video is only available to UK users using Windows Media Player 10 or above.
If you’re wondering why your Website barely gets any traffic past the odd passing tuft of virtual tumbleweed, it may be time to pay a visit to the Link Popularity Checker at 
You’ll then be presented with a long list of results, colour coded from ‘limited presence’ (0-1,000 references) to ‘Contender’ (20,001-100,000) right up to dong-waving, ‘900lb Gorilla’ if your site has over half a million references in search engines.
There’s also the option to get a ‘trend/history’ report charting your Website’s link popularity over time.
We have to say we’ve found the results to be a tad variable at times, but the site is still a useful tool to find out who’s linking to your site and how you’re doing against both your rivals and the big boys of the Web.
Barely a month after buying up software developers @Last Software, Google have released a free version of their popular 3D-modelling application SketchUp.
Details, textures and glass can also be added to models, which can then be uploaded onto Google Earth or shared with fellow modelling aficionados by posting them to the 3D Warehouse – a new site where SketchUp users can store, share and collaborate on designs.
When it comes to pixel-waving, Casio look set to kick sand in the face of their rivals with the announcement of their new EXILIM ZOOM EX-Z1000 camera, boasting a man-sized 10 megapixel sensor.
For wobbly hands and low light shots, there’s Casio’s Anti Shake mode onboard backed by an ISO range extending all the way up to ISO 3200 (in BEST SHOT mode).
Battery life looks set to last a vacation too, with a claimed 360 shots per charge.
The EX-Z1000 is expected on the shelves in in mid-May, priced at around £380.
The “Old Media” is still struggling with the idea of the Internet – and discovering that embarrassing mistakes can’t be swept under the carpet. On the Internet, insults are permanent, the Guardian has discovered.
Read the story as it is today on the Guardian web site; you’ll see that Burgess is quite right to point out that the book in question was, as the cannibal admits, “The Vagina Monologues.”
No insult, obviously, was intended to the eminent writer, Steyn. But it looks like some people have got cold feet. Today’s London Evening Standard, early editions, reported that the Guardian had not covered itself with glory: “Great copytaking of our time,” it crowed in its Wednesday Media section; “Yesterday’s Guardian included the correction…” and quoted the correction, as given above, in full.
Now rocking up to version 10, Agendus is a stable, featured-packed integrated PIM application for the Palm OS.
In fact, just about every element of the program seems intuitively thought out, with lots of nice touches reflecting the developer’s attention to detail.
When adding a new appointment, for example, you can add invitees, assign categories, sketch a note, add a custom icon, add a voice message and photo – with all these options being accessible through a clear and concise interface.
Multiple relationships can be assigned to the same contact and the list is customisable, so you could add new categories like, “Fellow Borg” or “Desperate Drinker.”
If you’re the type who quickly forgets who you met, contacts can be linked to events to build a contact history, exportable as a CSV file.
There’s also a basic project management interface onboard letting you organise complex tasks with hierarchical To Do items and set task ‘roll over’ status.
Conclusion