Back in December of 2009, I wrote about Paul Clarke trying to solve the problem of where's my train; that there must be a definitive, raw source of real-time (train) information and that

I assert that train operators know where their assets are; it would be irresponsible if they didn't

Whilst the plethora of train operators that fragmented from the ashes of the old British Rail network haven't answered this challenge yet, Transport for London has, opening up just such data as part of the London Datastore API. In today's age of talented web mashup developers, if you release an API people will build things with it if the information is useful and interesting and that's just what Matthew Somerville of MySociety did at the recent Science Hack Day ... a (near) realtime map of the London Underground showing the movement of trains of all of the Tube lines. A screen grab wouldn't do it justice and it takes a while to load, so a video grab might help here.

Last month I wrote that a map says as much about the fears, hopes, dreams and prejudices of its target audience as it does about the relationship of places on the surface of the Earth. With the benefit of hindsight I think I was only half way right.

Sometimes a map becomes more than just a spatial representation and becomes something else.

Sometimes a data visualisation becomes more than just the underlying data and almost takes on a life of its own.

When these two things meet or collide the results can be spectacularly compelling and produce, unintentionally ... art? Look at the image below ... filigree lace work? Crochet for the deranged of mind? Silk for the sociopath? Macrame for the mad? Sadly none of the above.

It's instead an image from the Geotagger's World Atlas but it's still unintentionally beautiful.

Consider for a moment the word unlimited; it's an adjective and, if you'll pardon the condescension, it means the following:

1. not limited; unrestricted; unconfined
2. boundless; infinite; vast
3. without any qualification or exception; unconditional

Except in the world of mobile data or mobile broadband, where unlimited means, in a vaguely disturbing twisted, inverted, doublespeak sort of way, the exact opposite.

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.