Pezholio

It’s been a while since my last blog post, and after a request from Twitter, I thought it might be time to dust off Wordpress and do a quick blog post. Since we last spoke, UK Postcodes (the postcodes webservice I blogged about a few blog posts back) has been plodding along nicely and, as [...]

Some people would say we’re mad, but last Saturday, on the hottest day of the year so far, a group of people eschewed barbecues and beer in the garden for a whole day spent working with mapping data and other bits of open data to help people understand the benefits of open data at Mapitude, [...]

Well, it’s finally happened, Ordnance Survey have gone from being the bad guy of the internet, a big, bumbling behemoth, squishing innovation wherever it goes, to being the darling of the internet, throwing out free data wherever it goes (well, sort of).
As well as lots of mapping data being released, it also release Codepoint Open, [...]

Well, it’s been an exciting few months for the open data movement, with the future of the Ordnance Survey and geographical data going out to consultation and data.gov.uk being launched, but imagine my horror when I finally received a response to the petition I started to make postcode data free to non-profits. The full text [...]

I’ve been playing around with the Ordnance Survey linked data and, while it’s not perfect, it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
It’s got me thinking though – in an ideal world, where an ‘information-wants-to-be-free’-esque hippy such as myself could get all the data I wanted, what cool stuff could be added on to [...]

As a lot of you probably know, I’m a big fan of open data, as well as driving innovation and making it easier to share information, it’s also a lot of fun.
Now, councils are pretty slow in picking this stuff up, for all sorts of reasons (lack of knowledge / interest, lack of technical skills, [...]

Well, it happened. today, the Royal Mail have issued ernestmarples.com with a takedown notice, demanding that the service be taken down immediately under pain of legal action.
For those of you who don’t know, Ernest Marples was / is a system that provided not-for-profit sites (such as HealthWhere, JobcentreProPlus.com, Planning Alerts and, by extension Twitterplan) with [...]

Pity the poor postcode, for years, he’s been locked up in a basement at the Royal Mail offices, and only let out if someone pays a humungous fee to let him out.
Well, thanks to the mysterious Ernest Marples, the postcode has been let out of his cell and is free to run about, jump and [...]

With the recent publication of the Digital Britain report and Gordon Brown calling on Tim Berners-Lee to help open up access to government data, there’s been a lot of talk about public organisations opening up data.
Most of this has focused around APIs and linked data (something I’m very passionate about already), but there’s much simpler [...]

Just a quick post to get a bit of knowledge out there about this here petition on the Number 10 website.
For years, the Royal Mail (a company which we (being the taxpayer) are the majority shareholders of) have been the sole custodians of something called the PAF (postcode address file), which, amongst other things, links [...]