Via the always fascinating Prospect, a great article about the genesis of data.gov.uk, the website on which the ONS have published a load of governmenmt data for downloading, manipulating and mashing by the likes of, well, anyone.
The project was allegedly born out of a meeting between Gordon Brown and Tim Berners-Lee. At this meeting Berners Lee reputedly told Brown that it was pointless just collecting all this data and then sitting on it. What he should do is to make it available to the public. Then great things will happen.
Berners-Lee had an example. Directgov had recently published a list of cycle accident locations in the UK. Within 48 hours of this information being made public a chap called Tom Taylor had combined it with Google Map data to create a map of cycle blackspots that all cyclists could refer to.
The data had been made useful to the public. Quickly. And at no cost to the government. Everyone wins.
Seemingly convinced, data.gov.uk was set up.
And some of the results have been fantastic. Check out the apps here. My own personal favourite, the ASBOromoter, which collects all the data on anti-social behaviour and presents it back as a beautifully rendered iPhone app. If you want to see it in action, both Will S and Phil H have got it on their phones. As has my wife, who was somewhat shocked to discover that there has been a crack house closure in our lovely new rural idyll in the last 12 months. This did, though, compare very favourably with our previous central London location.
Perhaps most interestingly of all, the app also presents data on the proportion of people within a borough who believe anti-social behaviour is a problem, which can then be compared to the actual level of such behaviour. Though clearly I haven't done the work (far too busy), it would be fascinating to see how closely related perception and reality are. Then you could overlay readership of the Daily Mail, and see how closely that correlated to the perception of the scale of the problem of anti-social behaviour.
I know which two data sets I think would correlate most closely.
-- Toby
Not only does Data.gov.uk facilitate interesting, quirky and useful applications such as the ASBOmeter - but also helps the government appear more transparent, crucial in a time when we have MPs defrauding the country with their scandalous abuse of expenses and trust of the ruling class is at an all time low.
Aside from this, it represents great use of emerging technology which is all focussed on location. Smart phones and services such as Google's Latitude and Foursquare allow us to make better use of now - where and what we are doing at any single moment in time.
The implications for marketeers is significant - as the technology and its use becomes more widespread - brands will be able to communicate with their consumers right up to the point of purchase. John Willshire has written an interesting piece on what he has called "immediacy theory" - sort of Recency theory 2.0 i guess - http://tinyurl.com/ykqre69.
As communications professionals, we have often worried about the "final six feet" - with smart phones and location based services that distance could be more like the final foot.
Posted by: Tom Darlington | March 29, 2010 at 06:47 PM
I wonder if the last foot is becoming the last few seconds - the problem is not so much distance as time. Dazzle Ships and others have written previously about attention scarcity and whether you laughed at it in 'Up' (Squirrel!) or smirked at the Twitter 'as near zero point between interruptions' that appears in this amusing blog entry http://saurondor.blogspot.com/2007/03/micro-blogging-or-just-obnoxious-web.html
then time would seem to be of the essence.
Posted by: Tim Forrest | March 30, 2010 at 05:57 PM