Gary Gale

I find myself travelling a lot for work these days and that means a roaming service for wifi hotspots and hotel internet connections really makes life simpler. I could maintain subscriptions to The Cloud, T-Mobile Hotspots, BT OpenZone and so on and so on, but fortunately Yahoo! provides me with an iPass subscription.

iPass is great; it allows me to connect to pretty much every hotspot and hotel internet service there is. I've been using it for over 4 years now and can only think of a single time when I haven't been able to get a connection. I'm using it right now, sitting in the departures lounge at Berlin's Tegel airport waiting for my flight back to London.

So far, so great, but the current, Snow Leopard supporting, version of the iPassConnect app, v3.1, seems to have been designed by someone with scant regard for anything approaching consistency and usability. Let me count the ways in which this app frustrates.

One of the things I write about a lot on this blog are the areas of location and online, or digital, identity and how these two areas overlap and sometimes conflict.

I write about this stuff not only because I'm lucky enough to work in both of these areas but I also find them fascinating, compelling and nowhere is this more evident in how individuals and organisations views this arena.

Companies, if they're foresighted enough, are making major plays in the location field, fuelled by the proliferation of location aware devices (cameras, phones, netbooks and the like) and by the convergence of these devices (I use an iPhone ... is it a phone, a camera, a GPS unit, an internet terminal, a computer or some combination of them all?). There's much value to a company in knowing your customer's location and how it changes over time. Indeed it's a truism that it's much less about where you are now and much more about where you've been.

Individuals, if they're informed enough, know about the plays the companies are making in the location field and  should know how to determine the value proposition that is offered when they give up their location.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the gadgets that made 2009; now it's time to look at the organisations and by strange coincidence, as there were 3 gadgets, so there are 3 organisations.

First up is OpenStreetMap. One of the things I write about a lot is geographic data, how everyone wants free, open, high quality data but how no-one really wants to pay for it. While attempts to monetise the data corpus of OpenStreetMap haven't entirely succeeded, yet, there's no denying that all the contributors to one of the biggest crowdsourced data projects on the Internet ... believe, and they've created something incredible.

The second organisation is the Ordnance Survey, or to be more specific, the staff of the Ordnance Survey. Much maligned and the object of much derision within the geo community, the majority of the staff as the OS have been working towards opening up the vast reams of excellent high quality geo data and it finally looks as if their hard work and belief is paying off.

And thirdly is the folks behind the GeoVation Challenge Award.

As the end of 2009 and of the decade of the noughties approaches rapidly, I thought it worthwhile to look back over the previous 12 months and give credit where credit is due or overdue. So let's start with gadgets.Not one but three. 

Firstly there's Posterous. Can a web service be a gadget? I think so. According to Wikipedia, gadgets "are invariably considered to be more unusually or cleverly designed than normal technological objects at the time of their invention".So, Posterous. Yes it's a blog creation tool but it's a simple, fiendishly simple blog creation tool. Nothing more than an email to post@posterous.com and you're done. It's how I wrote and posted this post. You focus more on the act of what you're writing, or the photo you've just taken, than on the mechanism where the post is formatted and uploaded. My posterous blog is https://vicchi.posterous.com/ and this auto feeds into my main WordPress driven blog at /.

The industry I work in thrives on data; we consume loads of the stuff and in turn we generate petabytes of it. I'm talking about data in general, not the geographic, mapping or place data that I usually write about.But the longer I work in the Internet industry the more convinced I become that, as an industry, we need to get our act together. How else to explain the bizarre, rapidly changing and capricious nature of how we gain access to, use, pay, don't pay and disseminate data?We're socially conditioned to assume that free does not equate to good, hence the adage "there's no such thing as a free lunch". So stuff that costs is good and stuff that's free isn't. But normal rules don't apply here.

This is not the blog post I set out to write. The one I set out to write was about Flickr, about machine-tags, about noticings and about transport data feeds. I had it all mapped out in my head during one of those wide awake in the middle of the night and your mind's buzzing moments. But as I started to research the blog post that I had set out to write, it mutated.

So with the caveat that I'm well aware that I'm making a sweeping generalisation whilst simultaneously doing a large disservice to a lots of specialist UK data providers ... 

Until recently, if you wanted a source of geo data in the UK you had three choices.