Gary Gale

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.

We're all familiar with the scene. You're stuck on the end of the phone, to yet another call centre, you're on hold due to "significantly high call volume", you're paying premium rate for the privilege of being on hold and a disembodied voice interrupts the on hold musak to say "your call is important to us, please continue to hold".

Well, obviously not that important, because if it was that important than there'd actually be someone to answer the phone. Add into the mix that it's way outside of normal peak hours and you realise that "significantly high call volume" really means "we've only employed two people, one of them is on holiday and the other is taking their only toilet break of the day".

So far, so familiar. The curse of the non specific, applies to everyone, on hold experience. But oddly nowhere near as bad as when the non-specific, applies to everyone approach transfers to email and a company threatens to sue you if you don't renew.

Telematics, the use of GPS and mobile technology within the automotive business, and the Web 2.0, neo and paleo aspects of location have traditionally carved parallel paths, always looking at if they would converge but somehow never quite making enough contact to cross over.

But not any more.The combination of 3G mobile communications and GPS enabled smart-phones such as the iPhone and the BlackBerry means that one way or another, the Internet and the Web are coming into the car, either in your pocket or into the car itself.