Press Gazette: Thelondonpaper to expand online map with local business listings
Thursday, 20 August 2009, 16:11
Just stumbled across one of my old cuttings… Guess this type of local data project for London is now up for grabs…
SearchEngineLand: Land Grab: Google Expands Real Estate Listings
Monday, 6 July 2009, 21:48
"… newspapers and other classified ad providers … please meet your new neighbor: Google.com. Google has expanded its real estate listings and added extra search functionality for users to find property listings in Google Maps."
Google Maps Mania: Mapping LA Crime
Thursday, 9 April 2009, 07:40
"This Google Map from the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) E-policing program shows up-to-date crime statistics for neighborhoods throughout LA."
Guardian: Google Maps reveals disparity in neighbouring MPs’ expenses claims
Saturday, 4 April 2009, 05:42
"A Guardian project using Google Maps has revealed differences of up to £20,000 in neighbouring MPs' travel expenses. … The MPs' travel expenses data was transformed into an easy-to-read Google Map by Tony Hirst, a lecturer at the Open University and Guardian reader. He picked up the figures from the paper's website as part of Data Store, the Guardian's unique experiment in allowing its readers access to key sets of data."
Google Maps: Britain’s independent local blogs
Monday, 23 February 2009, 12:26
Justin Williams' map of independent local news sites in the UK.
Bournemouth Echo: Collapse of High Street legend
Thursday, 27 November 2008, 10:50
Very nice use of Google Maps at the Bournemouth Echo, using it to illustrate where local Woolworths and MFI stores are located. Good to see maps used on a standard news story rather than a larger standalone feature.
Spod.cx: Leaked BNP Member List Map
Wednesday, 19 November 2008, 13:54
"I have decided to take down the map. Many people have commented that the map does give a false impression of accuracy, despite my making this clear, and I'm tempted to agree. I do not want to single anybody out and by removing the accuracy from the map it is possible that it ends up incorrectly implying a property contains a BNP member. It has been suggested that an inaccurate map that doesn't make that clear is worse than publishing the list itself, and I think that's a reasonable comment."
Techcrunch UK: Updated: BNP member list mashed with Google maps creates a sea of red dots, but dangerously inaccurate
Wednesday, 19 November 2008, 13:49
Mike Butcher: "I speculated on Twitter this morning that a mashup which identified the actual locations of BNP members would be highly problematic, and possibly even subject to vigilante attack. …."
Adrian Monck: The British National Party – a mash-up challenge
Wednesday, 19 November 2008, 11:46
Adrian Monck issues a challenge following the leak of the BNP membership data which touches on the ethics of geocoding sensitive datasets: "who’ll be first to mash up the data and produce a map of the membership? You ought to be able to do it without revealing personal details."
Google Maps Mania: UK Media Using Google Maps
Sunday, 26 October 2008, 12:28
"[ITN] have created a news map that delivers news based on the user's location. The map uses the Google Gears Geolocation API to determine the user's location and then serves up news for that region."
Inside Guardian.co.uk: guardian.co.uk goes geotagging and gets Google maps
Saturday, 11 October 2008, 12:57
Paul Carvill: "We have published our first article containing geolocation data! We introduced this feature in the US Elections blog pages to track our reporters as they travel with the presidential election campaigns. On those pages you can see a Google map with the points marked where our reporter wrote a blogpost. … . We are using the GeoRSS Simple location encoding standard."
LiverpoolEcho.co.uk: News in Merseyside
Wednesday, 1 October 2008, 17:33
The Liverpool Echo's new geocoded news stories.
MediaGuardian.co.uk: Trinity Mirror to launch map-based news service on regional websites
Wednesday, 1 October 2008, 17:31
"Trinity Mirror has launched a map-based news service on the Liverpool Echo website and plans to expand it across its other regional sites. The site will geo-tag news stories so users can search for news stories via postcode."
Planning applications as hyperlocal news
Monday, 22 September 2008, 07:59
The mysterious Grey Cardigan this weekend blogged about his infuriation with his local weekly’s habit of using news of local planning applications to fill the space left over above the birth, death and marriage announcements in the classified section:
[T]aken as a measure of usefulness to readers living in rural idyll, whether or not a near neighbour is about to attach a carbuncle to their cottage is probably the most important news the paper can bring us; more so, even, than the inevitable uproar about bin collections on the front page.
But because the space available for planning applications is variable, some weeks they will be perfectly legible while on others they will be down to 6pt or worse, or even published incomplete or left out altogether. I know it’s a small thing, but it annoys me that such a valuable service is treated so poorly. It might be ineptitude, it might be laziness, but it’s little things like this that endanger sales.
I hope Grey will forgive the intervention of a mere newsroom “Web Monkey (Special Projects)” like myself, but he is absolutely right.
In addition to endangering their print sales, the approach to planning applications taken by Grey’s local rag is also endangering the relevance of its website — even though its parent company has, no doubt, recently professed a “hyperlocal” news strategy of some sort.
In online journalism circles, this would be discussed as an example of what Steven Johnson calls the “Pothole Paradox“: the fact that seemingly trivial developments happening near people’s homes interest them a great deal, while similar events occurring 100 metres further down the road are mind-numbingly boring.
The trick is to find a technological solution that will solve this paradox by targeting hyperlocal information, like planning application news, to only the handful of people who care a great deal about any given instance of it. Websites like Johnson’s Outside.in and Everyblock are attempting to do this through geotagging local public sector information and local bloggers’ posts to deliver this sort of “pothole news” to people wherever they live.
Its also the sort of thing that (most) local newspapers — and their websites — don’t do particularly well.
While the Grey Cardigan’s local paper is (like many others like it) still squeezing planning application details into 6pt type, two UK websites – PlanningAlerts.com and PlanningFinder.co.uk are busy coming up with a better way of providing this information to its former readers.
Both sites work the same way: Enter your postcode, and the site will automatically send you an e-mail alert if any neighbour within a given radius proposes said monstrous carbuncle extension.
Why aren’t local papers providing clever online services like this? It’s certainly a medium more appropriate to reporting planning applications than a weekly digest in 6pt type.
Services mapping local information to readers’ location like this are a tiny part of a bigger trend to develop the geographic web and its ancillary, local search — where the relevance of information is measured by its proximity to readers’ current location or to places significant to them. The mobile phone operators understand the commercial significance of this, as does Google. Why do you think they are investing so much money in cartography?
They’re coming after the local papers that no longer offer the most efficient way of getting local information to their readers.
