Yesterday morning my wife’s 3g iPhone arrived and it stirred mixed feelings in me.
Like my strange mongrel approach to music, I don’t side with either camp in a cod Mitchell-and-Webb-style. As a journalist who surfed the ‘desktop publishing revolution’ I’ve worked with both. And both have annoyed me.
My wife bought a G4 laptop last year, it was a nice bit of kit but its expense made me (and the wife) worry about taking it out and about, so I went for a Dell netbook. I was late getting an iPod, choosing instead to get more phone memory and put everything on my Sony Ericsson.
It was only when we were flying back from San Francisco after “The Drive Of Your Life” that I succumbed and got two – from a vending machine in the airport!
So, two weeks ago Vodafone offered me a HTC Tattoo, a nifty little Android which I’m really enjoying. This is my first blog from it.
On Thursday Jules drops the iPhone bomb. I can’t deny it is a thing of ‘ubiquitous’ beauty and plenty of people have pored over this fact.
However, my Android has plenty of advantages – not least its easy integration with all things Google. It fits really nicely in my hand and feels sturdier. I won’t worry about damaging it.
So Jules suffixed her iPhone delight with “you can buy an iPad if you like”.
Maybe.
Maybe I’ll hold out for the Mag+ which looks much more durable and hopefully a touch cheaper.
As visitors to the HashBrum site might know I’ve been working on this map for a while now.
My FOI Request of cycling accidents and their locations came through and I was able to put the details straight into Mapalist. I exported as KML and re-imported but for some reason the details about the pins didn’t copy.
So, even though these pins look a bit untidy in the larger map, they nevertheless should help cyclists take more care in accident areas.
The key is on the larger map but the general gist is:
Blue hued pin = cycle incident
Pink hued pin = cycle hazard
Primary colour = fatal accident
Staying Updated
Through an RSS from FixMyStreet I’ve been tracking potholes that have been reported to Birmingham City Council and also pinpointing any potholes mentioned on the Council’s Twitterstream. I will also be tracking my own cycle journeys and keeping an eye on any other hazards I see.
If you would like to add any hazards please feel free.
Robin PC contacted me through Help Me Investigate. Robin suggested I shouldn’t just look at mapping data. He commented ‘The safe way to cycle is to “get in the way”’. I put Robin’s advice to the test, see how I got on:
I decided it was about time to get out there and start tracking my own cycle routes. On the map below you can see my latest track. Click on the Recent Tracks tab and you can scroll through all my journeys as I wheel about, gathering cycle interviews and other usual daily Hashbrum business!
If you click through to Details beside each track, you can see I’ve written a short piece on each journey in my Notes section. These act as a summing up of my journey including any safety concerns I see. If you’d like to add your routes and comment on your experiences (and you have an Android or Smartphone) then this App should cost around £5.99. Once you’ve got it if you could let me know below and befriend me.
I’m also hoping to export this data and it will inform my next map based on experiences of people road cycling in Birmingham.
Online News Association kicked off their 2010 monthly meet-ups by inviting renowned blogger Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) to add his own incendiary opinion on social media, real time and data driven journalism of the future.
It was one of the best journalism discussions I had been to in a while. You can replay the liveblog below and or compare perspectives (it’s the future!) with @brian_condon.
I’m currently working on game based around a kind-of psycho-geographic version of the ’six degrees of seperation’ idea. Basically, the game encourages players to (tenuously) link together Birmingham facts and myths. Here’s a version played on Google Wave before Christmas:
It was quite fun but as you can see it collapsed when we used Wave to discuss ‘the process’ of the game. And I couldn’t engage enough people in Wave to make it worthwhile.
It might be more appropriate to run it in Twitter but I think before I jump on there I want to work out how to get people understand how the game runs. I was thinking I might put some rules up either here or on #Brum site.
If it has a click through Wordpress page to I might be able to take the game to a second stage and prove or disprove the facts or myths, offering more background and links away from the focus of gameplay. This might be the journalism but the degree of proven truthfulness could be used as a points system of sorts.
Well there’s still a lot to work through… Would love to hear what you think of this idea, or if you have any strong opinions on the following questions then speak your brains below…
Is Twitter the best place to run the game?
Should I be wary of too many rules?
Any ideas how I can get more folk involved?
Should there be a live geo-tagging picture version – and might that get you extra points?
Is there anything we can use to graphically show the facts so it represents a load of spaghetti links?
Just before Christmas, I was invited by Capsule to talk at their first KMKY event in association with Created In Birmingham.
I’ve just found the audio on my dictaphone today so thought I’d put my talk online for you. You can right click ’save target’ for the MP3 here or you can listen to it below.
I was first on so Jon Bounds introduces the concept at the beginning.
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In addition to introducing ourselves we were asked ‘What would you do with a space like Vivid’. I decided what Birmingham was missing most of all was an informal meeting place for artistic creativity to flow. As it turned out there is one, but the fact that I didn’t know about it until the talk probably says more about the success of this ‘informal chit-chat’ night.
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