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.
Google Maps Mania: Create Your Own Feed Maps
Tuesday, 19 August 2008, 09:02
"Feed Maps is a new API from Map Channels that lets users create Google Maps mash-ups from a number of different data sources. The data sources that can be combined in one map are; KML files, GeoRSS, My Maps, Tab-delimited text and Google Spreadsheets."
Chicago Tribune Magazine: Cyberstar
Sunday, 17 August 2008, 08:41
A long interview with Adrian Holovaty about Everyblock. "In Chicago, we've got 14 types of information," Holovaty says. "We're creating an ordered view of chaos. That's what journalists do, right?"
Metropolitan Police Service: Crime mapping test site
Thursday, 14 August 2008, 15:36
"The purpose of this site is to help show where crime is occurring at a local neighbourhood level. It has been developed by the MPS in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police Authority and the Mayor of London."
Tomski.com: Tom Loosemore’s Blog: Met Police Crime Maps
Thursday, 14 August 2008, 15:35
"It's a pretty decent first effort, in that the data is down to a nicely local level (typically half a dozen streets) and aggregates geographically (so you can see basic crime data for the streets near you, for your ward, for your borough and for London as a whole)."
ThisisLondon: New internet ‘clickable crime maps’ will show families every incident in their neighbourhood
Monday, 28 July 2008, 21:16
"Cabinet Office papers reveal the final plan intends to go even further. It will use images from Google, which show aerial pictures of every street and park in the country"
ThisisLondon: New internet ‘clickable crime maps’ will show families every incident in their neighbourhood
Monday, 28 July 2008, 21:16
"Cabinet Office papers reveal the final plan intends to go even further. It will use images from Google, which show aerial pictures of every street and park in the country"
Friday, 11 July 2008, 20:31
Comments
"The Banjax Crime Map is a map of crime in Northern Ireland. The data for the map comes from the Northern Ireland Neighbourhood Information Service (NINIS)."
Wednesday, 18 June 2008, 14:31
Comments
Some interesting features on the new Mail & Guardian site: StoryPredictor suggests articles according to reader interests. NewsSwarm shows who is viewing articles. StoryHistory utility will save articles … Articles will be integrated with Google Maps.
Saturday, 14 June 2008, 12:29
Comments
"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."
Sunday, 1 June 2008, 15:23
Comments
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…
