"The UK has one of the planet’s more granular postcoding systems, with each of the nation’s 1.8m individual postcodes covering on average 15 houses. In IT terms, that’s a remarkably accurate piece of geocoding data…"

Kevin Marsh: ‘journalists have always been far more entranced by ‘the story’ than audiences. Less than a quarter of newspaper readers claim to read to the end of a story, even one they’re interested in ."

"Journalism has several subdisciplines — photography, information graphics, video. I advocate that computer programming should be another one of those subdisciplines."

"New guidance will mean that there will be more crime mapping: a paper published by the Cabinet Office … notes … that ‘Police forces are due to provide standardised local information on crime, starting from Summer 2008 …’"

"Ah yes, the fear of knowing too much. Why don’t we just buy houses without ever seeing them? Why do we bother getting them surveyed? If house prices are affected, might it not also push up prices in places that don’t have crime?"

"Like the maps that the magazine Harper’s used to run, the concept is that the weekly maps will work as stand-alone features, not necessarily connected to a story or to content in the paper.."

"The Toronto Star’s new Map of the Week project has published a set of school vaccination maps which illuminates an ongoing measles outbreak in the Toronto metro area — the worst in more than a decade."

Following the crane collapse in Manhattan this week, the NY Times plots crane violations on a Google Map. This has recently been an issue in Britain as well. Somebody should do this story for London…

Adrian Holovaty encourages "roll your own maps" at Where 2.0 Web designers resist having to use templates from software providers (e.g. blogging templates from Wordpress), why should maps be treated differently?

A new site that compiles public record data about crime and anti-social behaviour at particular locations - for a fee. Targeted at house buyers, but would obviously be a good hyperlocal news product as well.

"Four Plymouth lawyers have launched a nationwide service that will tell you how safe and pleasant your new street is. For a fee of under £100 they will do an anti-social behaviour version of the traditional structural survey…"

Boris Johnson vowed to introduce street-level crime mapping in London "on day one". Where’s our mashup dataset, Boris?

Is screen-scraping a website legal in the UK? (MP3) It could be limited by copyright law or the Computer Misuse Act.

Is screen-scraping a website legal in the UK? (MP3) It could be limited by copyright law or the Computer Misuse Act.