Just as the country was unfreezing itself from our unaccustomed lengthy period of snow and ice, Dave Harte, as part of his taking over the running of the hyperlocal blog in his local area, laid a challenge before Birmingham City Council to make freely available – in an easy importable and mashable format – the data of which roads the gritting wagons go down.

Sounds a bit dull when described like that, but the point of it being in a mashable format is that would allow other websites to easily import that data for their own use – to produce a map of the routes just for your own local area, or for the whole city. Dave’s point was that he had to do a whole bunch of unnecessary work in making a new map by drawing lines on Google Maps taking the text information on the council gritting routes pages, when surely since the council already has the mapping data from its own mapping systems, why can’t it just make that data available from source?

Which is a reasonable question, if you don’t know the answer! Actually, most councils (or at least the people within them who use or have other interests in the data themselves) would love to release this data – after all, as Dave points out, at its crudest it’s a way of enabling community volunteers to do useful things with it instead of the council having to do (and therefore pay for) it.

The sad fact is, much as councils would like to release this data, central government, in the form of its various quango agencies, won’t let them. The mapping data for the gritting routes is derived from mapping by the Ordnance Survey – ie, the mapping .kml (or whatever) files are generated by somebody clicking on an Ordnance Survey map in a piece of mapping software, which then makes that data subject to OS’s rather restrictive licensing conditions – meaning that if those councils were to release that data, they’d get sued by the OS. No ‘might get told off’, most definitely will get sued – when it comes to protecting their intellectual property, the OS make Disney look cuddly. And sadly, over 90% of local government geodata (especially the interesting stuff) is compiled in this way – not by council workers walking around with handheld gps devices doing their own survey.

“But wait!”, I hear you shout, “OS are due to make their mapping free from April 2010!”

Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that – OS are indeed making the maps free, but any data which is derived from those maps (ie, by somebody clicking on it) will still be restricted.

So the target for ire about the inability of local activists to easily produce a map of, say, local lollipop operatives – aka School Crossing Patrols – should be central government, not your local council.

You’d think, though, that with the launch of www.data.gov.uk – central government’s new open data repository – we’d be seeing the Dawn of a New Golden Age of Peace and Prosperity, with the possibility that this extra data will be in the second wave to be freed?

However, it looks unlikely, with the announcement that the petition to free the Royal Mail’s postcode data, which a number of interesting online applications were using until the Royal Mail threatened to sue them, has been rejected.

Don’t forget, all this data which the government continues to prevent us from using in our own applications, we have already paid for. We have a moral right to it. In the USA, not usually known for its free, open, and uncommercial attitude to things, absolutely anything which is created by a government employee is free for others to use, on that very basis that the taxpayer has already paid for it.

The other day my friend Pete Ashton posted an article in which he declared he was no longer a Social Media Consultant. Sort of.

Or rather, it’s not that he’s no longer doing what he’s been doing for a living for the last couple of years to go and do something else, rather, that – cutting a long story short – he’s not going to be describing himself as such any more.

Those of us who’ve been doing this thing for ages (especially those of us who have been doing it since long before the term was coined) have never been particularly comfortable with the term ’social media’, but we’ve grudgingly accepted it on the grounds that it doesn’t cause share prices to tumble on the stock market, nobody’s harmed by it, and the horses aren’t frightened by it. And nobody’s been able to think of anything better that’s caught on in a snappy way. Myself, I thought the term collaborative media might have legs (since that better describes what we do), but nobody else has nailed their colours to that mast.

Anyway, part of the point Pete makes is that whilst it was an OKish term for a while, it has now become polluted, as the PR people and the Marketeers and the all the other people have moved in thinking they need to have a ’social media strategy’ for their organisation, fundamentally missing the point about what social media is. It’s media, that’s social – that’s collaborative, interactive, and conversational. You’re having a conversation with your audience, not making a speech to them – and in a conversation you listen and respond, not just talk. And the ‘professionals’ moving in singularly fail to realise this – they want to have a Twitter feed, but want to have every post to their Twitter feed signed off by a manager before it goes out!

Some time after Pete published his article, he posted to Twitter giving a real-world example of why he wrote his post:

Only a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that blogs were dead and microblogging would soon replace them. Twitter was supposed to kill blogs because it’s so much simpler to publish one sentence fragment at a time rather than whole thoughts bunched together into what is known in the trade as ‘paragraphs’.

It beggars belief how anybody writing for what’s supposed to be a respectable technology blog could possibly think that.

To think that Twitter might have killed blogging because it’s easier to publish a sentence than it is to publish a collection of paragraphs is like saying that crisps might kill tartiflette because it’s easier to get a packet of Walkers than it is to get hold of Reblochon cheese. If I post to Twitter, it’s not because it’s ‘easier’, it’s because it’s frankly silly of me to log into Wordpress and faff about trying to come up with at least 200 hundred words for a narrative just to say that the water level of the canal by the NIA is quite high.

Admittedly, myself and my friends have often commented to each other how we all seem to be blogging less since we’ve been using Twitter more – but that’s not in the sense of microblogging killing fullblogging, it’s in the sense of a combination of the way we’ve repurposed our use of Twitter itself, and also that we send the appropriate communication to the appropriate channels. When I write an article here, I’m writing for the world and aware that some of my friends will be reading. When I write a post to Twitter, I’m writing for my friends and aware that some of the world will be reading. It’s as simple as that, and it’s not a competition.

So there.

(Pete’s article also raised a couple of other interesting resonances for me which I may well write about in a future post)

“European buyers of Windows 7 will have to download and install a web browser for themselves. Bowing to European competition rules, Microsoft Windows 7 will ship without Internet Explorer”.

I trust in the spirit of fair competition, Apple is also going to remove Safari from OS X, meaning Mac users will also need to download a browser before they can look at websites?

“It all began with a tin of cat food, an empty coffee tin and a hairdryer. When air was forced between the two tins, the ensemble began to float on its own little cushion of air. Thus, through a combination of eccentricity and genius, Sir Christopher Cockerell invented the hovercraft, in a shed, in a boatyard, in Norfolk”.

The hovercraft, whilst as a passenger carrying vehicle was superseded by the channel tunnel, is very much a British success story.

Development was largely funded under the aegis of the National Research and Development Corporation, a government body set up in 1948 expressly to help British inventors develop and commercialise their work. As well as the hovercraft, other British inventions which benefited from NRDC assistance include:

• Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• Interferon
• Continually Variable Transmission, &
• Disposable daily contact lenses

The NRDC was privatised in 1992 after being renamed British Technology Group, and thus public funding of research and development ended. BTG itself scaled its operation right down in 2005 to concentrate only on medical research. Of course, private enterprise hasn’t been entirely unsuccessful in bringing brand new products to market, as Clive Sinclair, Eric Laithwaite, James Dyson, and Trevor Baylis proved (though the first two clearly could have benefitted from better help in making their inventions commercially successful), but in an era where enterprise is supposed to be key to Getting Us Out Of The Recession(tm), what real help is government offering to British inventors? Indeed, what real help has government offered for enterprise in the last 25 years?

Nick Booth has written an excellent article in response to (although it actually predated it) a consultation Birmingham City Council are currently running about how to develop its Press Office service.

It’s sufficiently general that it works as good advice for any organisation thinking about how to modernise its public relations activity; indeed, it serves as excellent advice on how news organisations and magazines themselves might adapt to the reality of the modern world.