Tag Archive for Content

Geolocated content – what do we want?

September 11, 2012 2 comments

Most people who read this blog, or know me, will know that I have been working on a Nesta & Nominet Trust funded project on Augmented Reality for the past few months.

We have been taking content from various places and delivering it to people via their smart device based on there location, it is a bit of a hotch-potch of content with potholes from Fix My Street sitting beside food standard ratings from Rate My Place and content from local blogs. Nesta & the Nominet Trust have signed the project off now and are more than happy with what we have produced.

The AR project allowed us to create and test a platform that almost completely removes the barrier to entry for presenting content in to AR environments. We have a working proof of concept that we can show people and 99% of the people we do show go ‘wow that is so cool‘ or ‘if I give you this feed/data/content can you put it in there?‘ while pointing at the iPad.

Now we are starting to look at further developing the fantastic Apollo platform written by Adrian Short, to filter different types of content or produce different streams from different content creators. As part of this future development it would be really good if we could get a list of content types that people would find useful if they could be delivered based on location. Once we have a list then we can look at where we could get the data from, does it exist, do we need to create it etc. So two versions of the same question:

From a consumer of content perspective, what public service content would be good, useful, interesting if you could have it delivered to your smart device based on your location?

Or the same question to #localgov people, what content would be good, useful, interesting if you could have it delivered to peoples smart devices based on their location?

In other news about the same subject, we have submitted a proposal to the Knight News Challenge to develop the Apollo platform and build an Augmented Reality & Geolocation Toolkit, it would be really cool if you could go and like this so the nice people at the Knight Foundation can see that people are interested in what we are doing. If you are in a particularly Liking mood then you could also Like the n0tice entry as well.

So any ideas, suggestions & thoughts on Geolocated public service content or if you are in #localgov and have datasets that you might want to let us play with then talk to us in the comments below.

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Police Crime Mapping Site Goes Live

February 1, 2011 7 comments

This morning, well last night actually, www.police.uk went live.

Police.uk allows you to look at crime data by place name postcode or address, so really handy if you are looking to move, but also quite a handy content idea for your Hyperlocal site.

By entering a postcode you get several views available:

Overview

Just that, an overview on one page that shows you the local policing unit, along with, phone number, E-mail address and pictures of the officers & PCSOs (if they are available from the force site). A twitter feed from the force, a crime map, details of the next event in the area sucha as PACT meetings, and links to the main force site, micro-sites, FaceBook etc.

Crime Maps

A nice interactive Google map with all the crime mapped for you. Each pin is clickable and give you information about the crime, obviously no personal details are given and the map point is only so accurate. You can drag the pin around to get the data in a 2.5k radius from a particular point, your house, your school, office etc. You can then select different types of crime and look at those in isolation. It is a real shame you can’t then embed this map on your own site or even grab a link to it.

Meet The Team

A bigger version of the NPU information on the overview page, this shows all the NPU officers with contact details, a map showing the NPU area and the station they work from. This is driven from the local forces, so some are better than others.

Get Involved

Again an expanded version of the information available on the overview page with details of meetings and events.

Information & advice

Links out to other resources about minimising the risk of crime etc.

Other stuff

Data, you can download the data sets from. Data  is available by street or neighbourhood for each force.
Data by neighbourhood will give you a csv with these headings:

  • Month
  • Force
  • Neighbourhood
  • All crime and ASB
  • Burglary
  • Anti-social behaviour
  • Robbery
  • Vehicle crime
  • Violent crime
  • Other crime

Data by street gives you:

  • Month
  • Reported by
  • Falls within
  • Easting
  • Northing
  • Location
  • Crime type
  • Context

All the data is licensed under the Open Government Licence.  I’m going to play with the CSV files later today to see what I can make, as I’m pretty sure many others will be doing today. As @stef has just pointed out you can hack the URL to pull the data for a lat long pair without downloading the data set.

Apps, not really apps, just a link to the mobile site www.police.uk/m/ which will use the GPS location  data from your phone. You can suggest ideas and grab an API key to make your own applications using the data. For some reason, you have to wait to be approved before you get your API key. I’m not sure if they will link to any apps created to use their data on here eventually or just any ‘official’ ones.

My Thoughts

It is a good start, the website is easy to use for people of all abilities and the raw data is available to play with for the more technically minded.

On the down side the data looks like it will be released in batches monthly, I am assuming that the data will only be released for mapping at a certain point in the investigation and not ‘as it happens’.   There are no RSS feeds or embed me links for anything. It would be really nice if you could grab the map for your town, village NPU etc and stick it in your hyperlocal site directly. I’m sure it will only be a matter of time, days or possibly hours, before we see different uses of the raw data emerging using the  tools available on-line.

The biggest drawback I have found is that you can only have the data on the site by NPU, you can’t filter it by station, town or even a division, nor can you do it by the whole force. I would like to see all the crime for the Stoke-on-Trent Division of Staffordshire Police, if I use ‘Stoke-on-Trent’ as a search term I get given the data for the NPU for Hanley, which is the city centre for Stoke-on-Trent.

As I say it is a good start and very local but with a few more hours of development on the site they could have done a lot more with the data for the casual user. If I were scoring the site I think a deserved 7/10 from me.

This is just a quick overview, off you go now, go and play & make things, then come back and show us what you have done in your area. We want to see the best implementation of this data in a hyperlocal site. We may even give a prize at our next unconference.

Blog, Campaigning, hyperlocal, Mapping and Geolocation Tools, Writing and Content Ideas , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Content idea: Obituaries and Local Births, Deaths & Marriages

November 17, 2010 One comment
Charlie (in front) with friends at the Irish Heritage Xmas Dinner

Charlie (in front) with friends at the Irish Heritage Xmas Dinner

When Birmingham Irish Heritage Group committee member Charlie Leydon sadly died in February, chair Mike Walsh was keen for there to be a written tribute to him in two publications popular with group members – The Harp newspaper and the Digbeth is Good community website, which publishes monthly reports of the group’s events and notices.

Mike wrote a very touching piece about his friend – ‘A Bold Spirit Departs’, detailing Charlie’s great contribution to the group, the friendships he’d formed, his strong family ties and his love of Ireland. He sent it on to me with some photos asking that I publish it, which I was more than happy to do.

Gloria Johnson

Gloria Johnson

There are many other examples of tributes to key community figures on hyperlocal websites. When Kings Cross resident and campaigner Gloria Johnson passed away recently, William Perrin wrote a tribute about her unwavering commitment to the community On Kings Cross Environments. William ended the post by inviting readers to share their memories of Gloria, which many did with fond stories about a woman who was ‘Feisty, direct, perceptive, determined and warm.’

As an online space for community news and stories, a hyperlocal website is the perfect place for remembering local figures who have passed away and how they have helped the neighbourhood. Perhaps there is a special person who has left a lasting legacy in the area? As a community website that shares local history and heritage, Talk About Wolverton’s post about ‘lorry driver, poet, painter and community artist’  Bill Billings was inevitable – he created one of Milton Keynes’ most famous icons, the Dinosaur at Peartree Bridge and helped the children of Radcliffe School create a concrete sculpture for the Secret Garden in Wolverton, which still stands there today.

The Kington Blackboard has gone one step further with creating a space for tributes to local people with a Social Announcements page for ‘local births, graduations, marriages and other life milestones in Kington’. Might something like this be suitable for your community website, as a category if not a dedicated page?

Think about how you can use your community website not just for local news, notices and events but also as a space where  local people can share their achievements, celebrations and memories of those who are no longer around.

Quick Tips, Writing and Content Ideas , , , , , , , ,

B29 tortoise walk

September 8, 2009 No comments

Through The Keyhole by Charlie Pinder

On Saturday 15th July ‘Pindec’, of BirminghamB29.com, led a walk around the B29 postcode perimeter. But this was no summer stroll, this was a Tortoise Walk:

Apparently, in 1840s Paris, it was very trendy to wander around with a tortoise on a lead to make sure you were gong at the right speed to truly experience the city – so can anyone lend us a tortoise?

Unfortunately, no-one had a tortoise to spare that day but a sufficiently slow pace was set, ‘recording our feelings as we go, in the spirit of the flâneur (“a person who walks a city to experience it”).’

Exploring their surroundings in this unusual way meant the walkers started to notice things that had escaped their attention before, and wonder online what that plant is, or why someone saw fit to place a pylon right next to someone’s house. They concentrated on derelict buildings and building sites, reflecting on what was there before and what’s to come. They explored local historical sites, discovering the Weoley Castle ruins ‘completely by accident’ and taking the time to wander around. And they discovered ‘random things’ that just happened to catch their eye whilst they had the time to stop and investigate further.

And the best bit about it was the whole B29 perimeter walk odyssey was recorded on the site by Pindec, who incorporated everyone’s comments, photographs and audioboos into her blog post about the day. This meant readers were able to share the walkers’ journey – read about their findings, see what made them stop and think and listen to what they had to say out loud.

Taking a different style of journey that makes you look at your area in a new light like this is a great way of generating interesting and unusual content for a hyperlocal site. You could try a Tortoise Walk like the B29ers, or try something a bit different if a snail’s pace isn’t your style. If you’re stuck for ideas The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel is a good starting point, and the website has an Index of Experiments for you to dip into and play with. Fancy ‘Taking a Line for a Walk’ or ‘Blind Man’s Buff Travel’? Or how’s about a messy hybrid of the two? Mis-guide.com is also worth delving into, leafing through their book A Mis-guide to Anywhere has given me an idea or two.

Have a think and go exploring your area in weird and wonderful ways, either as a group or on your own if you’d prefer. Just be sure to record each new discovery and how you came about it, so your readers can share in your adventure.

Blog, Success Stories , , , , , ,

Where to go when you hit a dry patch

September 1, 2009 No comments

It is important that your hyperlocal site is updated regularly so people will come back and visit.  Don’t fall in to the trap of publishing for the sake of publishing as your quality will reduce and you may turn your visitors away.

There are several resources where you can look for ideas for articles to publish on your site.  Depending on your site and the type of content you normally publish some of the ideas below may help you.

Events listings – Look for local events to promote or to report on.

Hold The Front Page has a Story Ideas page which gets update reasonably regularly, using this may give you some ideas for content.

 

Quick Tips, Writing and Content Ideas , ,
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