Tom was discussing how the BBC uses “the web as its CMS” for some topics, such as using Music Brainz as a source for discography information, and Wikipedia as a source for introductions on various topic pages, such as those on the BBC Wildlife Finder about animals. As well as simply using the data though, the BBC also uses the identifiers from those sites in its URLs. For Music Brainz, these look like long strings of random letters, numbers and hyphens (the Beatles, for instance, are b10bbbfc-cf9e-42e0-be17-e2c3e1d2600d), which then form the end part of a URL at http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists (eg see the page for the Beatles). Wikipedia, though, uses ‘human readable’ identifiers, which look like words, with capital letters where appropriate, separated by underscores. So, for instance, the identifier for the Ursus arctos, commonly known as the ‘brown bear’, is simply Brown_Bear, and this too is used in the URLs for both the Wikipedia and BBC pages for that animal.

There are some good, pragmatic reasons why Music Brainz chose random strings, but Wikipedia chose words. Music Brainz has data on far more artists, albums and tracks than there are Wikipedia pages, and a lot of their data is generated far more automatically and quickly than Wikipedia (eg by ripping CDs and uploading ID3 tags). Whereas Wikipedia pages all created by hand, and there’s a strong requirement to only have one page per topic, and so matching page names to the URLs is both doable and is helps to enforce unique page titles.

The biggest problem with URLs that use human-readable paths and identifiers, though, is that names can and do change. And if the name is tied to the URL, then when a name changes, you either leave the URL as it is (and live with the mis-match), or update the URL, with a redirect from the old one (and live with the fact that this stops all the URLs being ‘permanent’). Wikipedia currently follows the second option. Wordpress, by default, follows the first option (although you can manually re-name URL slugs to override this if you like).

So, you can see that there are pros and cons to having human-readable vs non-human-readable URIs. Within the realm of Linked Data, URIs are really important (as they identify concepts, as well as web pages), and so the design of URLs has to be even more carefully considered. To return to the meetup last week, Tom’s comment, which has prompted a fair bit of debate on this topic, was that “persistance beats human-readability”, and he seemed to regret having human-readable URIs on the BBC Wildlife Finder*. I disagreed, and a debate then ensued on the relative merits of human-readability vs persistance in URI design.

There were a range of opinions on this. Chris Sizemore commented that “I’m honest, I’m not as worried abt persistance as I prob shld b. Web got by, why can’t SemWeb?” Tom replied that “of course web of doc does get broken coz urls change. It’s quite expensive to keep link checking (incl what doc it points to)” and then suggested that “the whole opaque vs human readable URL thing is largely religious. Experience dictates which you think is more important”.

There followed a bunch of comments suggesting that it was more a pragmatic, rather than a “religious” decision, weighing up the relative costs and benefits of each approach, and Michael Smethurst pointed out that creating human-readable identifiers can be expensive.

I then suggested that “not even opaque URLs can be 100% persistent. Concepts change, merge and split”, and Chris Sizemore added “we should design [for] less than 100% persistance in URIs [and] promote ‘healing’ mechanisms”. I’m not sure that there are any real answers in this area yet – it’s still something to be investigated, and something the Linked Data community will have to deal with. I suggested that “HTTP already supplies some of the healing mechanisms: redirects, 300 Multiple Choice, 410 Gone, etc” and Michael suggested that “changed concepts, merged concepts and split concepts are new concepts so need new uris…”, which are two contrasting but not un-complementary methods. (Take the example where a company ’splits’, by spinning out a part of its business into a new one, and keeping the rest running under the same name and brand – whether the larger part of the ’split’ should retain the same URI is a decision that can either be philosophical or pragmatic).

I’ve come to the conclusion that URL design has to be done pragmatically, balancing lots of different factors, including readability of the identifiers, the ‘hackability’ of the path structure (ie the number of slashes to include), overall length, ease/costs of producing them, and overall the effect that all these things have on the ability for the URL to be ‘permanent’. It may be one of the axioms of the web that URIs are opaque, and that machines “should not look at the contents of the URI string to gain other information”, but there are lots of ways in which humans don’t follow this principle:

• URLs appear in search results (eg on Google), and users use these to help form a judgements on which links to click. For this reason, Google recommends making them “intelligible to humans”.
• URLs get printed, and shorter ones take up less space.
• URLs get typed in (occasionally), and so shorter ones are quicker to type. Characters which look similar (eg capital I and the number 1) can cause problems.
• URLs get used in Twitter, where they have to be really short (otherwise URL shortners get used).
• URLs get e-mailed, and recipients might use the URL to help understand what the link is about (if it’s not obvious from the e-mail).
• If URLs contain a lot of structure (eg domain.com/section/subsection/article/), users will sometimes try to navigate ‘upwards’ by removing words from the end of a URL up to a particular slash.
• Developers sometimes use URLs as an API (using REST and content negotiation), and so the path structure in URLs helps to communicate how the data is structured (eg what the types of things are, and how they are related). You can argue that developers shouldn’t do this, but hey, they’re human too, and it can be a handy first step to understanding.

There’s probably other ways in which URLs are treated as non-opaque by humans too.

I’m interested in how various sites and services negotiate this minefield of options and trade-offs. Here are some examples which I think are interesting:

• BBC programmes are given short ids (called ‘PIDs’), which use both letters and numbers, to keep them short (compared to using just numbers), but don’t use vowels (to avoid accidentally spelling out rude words).
• ISBNs consist of 10 or 13 digits, but they’re not completely ‘opaque’, as the publishers are allocated a range of numbers, and so you can tell from the ISBN who the publisher is (and there are books and services to help you do this). There’s also a ‘check digit’, which means that if you make a mistake typing in an ISBN, a system can tell you that you’ve made a mistake, rather than showing you a different book.
• Wikipedia URLs use the title of the page, but spaces are converted to underscores, as spaces aren’t valid characters in URLs, and so would have to be escaped as ‘%20′, which looks ugly.
• Most of the URLs on Flickr start with http://www.flickr.com/photos/, even for videos – which just goes to show that sometimes your website might change in ways that your initial URL design didn’t anticipate, which you’ll then need to make a decision on.
• Tag urls, as implemented on Flickr, Delicious, Last.fm, and similar sites, all use the tag name in the URLs. This feels pretty natural and obvious, mostly tags are essentially only a string of characters anyway, with no implied semantics, and so it’s fairly safe to assume a 1-to-1 mapping with the URL.

I might try and add to these lists as I discover other interesting examples, but for now, my message is that you have to think hard about URL design, weigh up the different options, and then be pragmatic about it…

P.S I’ve just remembered that I wrote a post about ‘how the BBC iPlayer broke its URLs’ a couple of years, which might also be relevant to this discussion…

* Tom later clarified that the bit he regretted was “including the /species/ etc. in the URL”, rather than re-using Wikipedia identifiers, though others have suggested there have been problems with this too.

Other blog posts on this topic:

• Martin Belam: Does ‘Linked Data’ need human readable URIs?
• Jeni Tennison: Creating Linked Data – Part II: Defining URIs
• Matt Jukes: Musings on Linked Data stuff

Updates: (9:31PM) Added a couple of extra links and examples. (9:54pm) Added link to Matt’s blog post. (Mar 1) Added P.S with link to an old blog post of mine.

However, it’s the axeing of BBC 6 Music that vexes me the most. This radio station has been a part of my life for the past six or so years, and is hugely important. It is literally the only reason that we own two DAB digital radios (given that we’ve always lived in cities with excellent FM reception, and so audio quality is irrelevant). Over time, I’ve watched the DJs come and go (having to say a sad goodbye to Phill Jupitus, Vic McGlynn and Andrew Collins), but the standard has always remained remarkably high, with just one, cough, exception. More importantly, the music is always more interesting, eclectic and appealing (to me), than any other station. I spend far more time listening to music via 6 Music than I do on my iPod/iPhone.

So the idea that the station is going to close is pretty distressing. I’ve seen tons of things I like get closed, from Urbis (just yesterday), to BBC Collective, and even the Millennium Experience (which was good, and had the potential to get better). But none of these closures have made me want campaign in the streets about them. Radio feels different somehow. Even though commercial radio stations do come and go (and get constantly rebranded), somehow they feel much more permanent than websites, visitor attractions, and so on. They feel like a fixture, a constant in our busy, changeable lives.

I would never be this bothered if a TV channel changed or closed down. BBC Four is great, and important, but we could live without it existing as a channel. The march towards non-linear television feels natural and unstoppable. I only care that the BBC continues to produce and commission good TV programmes, I’m not too bothered how I access them (I’ll even buy them on DVD or pay to download them via iTunes). But radio is much more substantially different to listening to an iPod, Last.fm, Spotify, and so on. Those are all great services, and I’m sure they’ll continue to improve (especially at doing personalised recommendations, which they still all suck at), but they are different and parallel to radio. Radio is about shared experiences. It’s about being ‘live’. It’s about good music, chosen for you by people who know it better than you. It’s about personalities who deliver warmth, wit and intelligent commentary. Those are all things that 6 Music delivers in abundance, and which are really difficult to find elsewhere.

The justification behind closing 6 Music doesn’t make sense. There may be reasonable arguments for re-thinking BBC Asian Network (treating the asian population as a single audience when they are as diverse as the rest of the population is perhaps tricky), and for cutting US imports and sports spending and focusing more on quality rather than popular content. There’s even an argument to be made for re-focusing the BBC’s online output and doing fewer things better, although setting arbitrary targets like cutting the number of web pages and reducing staff numbers is hardly giving much thought to this.

But the logic behind cutting 6 Music is nonsense. As many others have pointed out (and as is even alluded to in an earlier BBC Trust review of the station), it can’t be accused of having too small an audience whilst also not being niche and public service enough. The station has had to find a fine balance between growing audiences and remaining true to its distinctive music output. I think the BBC Trust review got this right by recommending that the station’s remit be altered to acknowledge the focus on celebrating “the alternative spirit in popular music” (a nice phrase) via presenters with a “strong musical credibility” (ie they can’t just be comedians). The idea that the station “unfairly harms commercial rivals” isn’t particularly credible either, given the relatively small audience and complete lack of any commercial rivals doing anything similar.

The truth is that only the BBC could run 6 Music. Absolute Radio (the newly relaunched Virgin Radio) may have made noises by offering to buy the 6 Music format and network, but they would never be able to run it at the same standard as the BBC. They’d cut costs dramatically, resulting in fewer DJs (especially the high profile ones, I expect), less music news coverage and fewer documentaries (which the BBC Trust had recommended increasing). Plus, they wouldn’t have access to the BBC’s extensive archive of music and recorded sessions. And then there are the ads, which kill any enjoyment of radio…

Besides, if the plans go ahead, then I imagine that the valuable spectrum released (two national DAB channels), would, for ‘fairness’ reasons, be auctioned off to the highest bidder. And there would be much more profitable national radio services to run than a commercial version of 6 Music.

So, having said why I think 6 Music should be saved, what do I (or ‘we’, if you agree with me) do about it, other than adding a Twibbon to our avatars on Twitter?

Well, the official process is that Mark Thompson will deliver his report to the BBC Trust, who will approve or amend it. They’ll probably do some form of consultation, so we can respond in our thousands to that. Outside of this, the issue may well become an election issue. The Tories have already spoken in favour of the proposed cuts. I can’t find any official Labour (or Lib Dem) response yet, but Labour MP Tom Watson has tabled a motion opposing the cuts, which will hopefully gain widespread support in the House of Commons. The unions, too, are reacting angrily to the news, with the NUJ threatening strikes and BECTU promising robust opposition.

But perhaps a grass-routes campaign might just help? Would the general public show their support for the BBC by marching on the streets? It would be a good test of the BBC’s value, anyhow. And if we don’t do something now, it might be the beginning of the end for such a cherished national institution.

I pledge my support to the campaign. And I’ll keep you posted.

Other commentary on this story:

• Phill Jupitus: Killing BBC 6 Music would be a slap in the face to licence-payers
• Andrew Collins: Dead air?
• James Cridland: 6 music, photography, and tidying up
• Jon Grant: Why close 6music and Asian Network?
• Fiona Stewart: Save BBC 6 Music

Updates: (Mar 1) Added two links to other blog posts.

spend the week writing an online news website … I’ll probably spend the week reading a lot of existing news and re-writing, quoting, linking, summarising it all … all being well I’ll publish the result, whatever it is, at the end of the week.

I, and the team at Rattle, have been thinking about news for a while. We’re interested in ways to make it better, more accurate, more discoverable, more social. I’m not sure we have the answers, but we’ve got plenty of ideas. One of which, “As Reported”, was short-listed for funding at the 4iP launch last year, but didn’t quite make it, and hasn’t come any closer to getting funded since.

Anyway, Phil’s project sounds interesting, and reminds me of the ‘citizen journalism’ week I spent reading, reporting and summarising the news from the BBC News offices way back in 2006 (gosh, didn’t I look young then?).

My process was a little different – I published as I went, on the Wikinews website, rather than at the end of the week – but the aims were similar. I has access to the “newswires”, but to be honest, that didn’t add much other than getting agency-derived news half an hour or so before everyone else. You can still read my diary of the week on the BBC News website. One of the things I was investigating with the week was finding a participation model for crowdsourced news websites. At the time, the Wikipedia approach, of having a large number of editors improve articles slowly over time, didn’t seem feasible for news, where speed is important, and the value of “old news” is generally pretty low. (I’m no longer true that this is totally true – the ‘urgency’ of much of the news seems a little overhyped, and the significant stories often seem to be the longer-lasting, slow-burn type.) So the experiment was to see how much news a single non-journalist person could compile and edit in a week, with the idea being that if it worked, perhaps we could all just take it in turns.

Anyway, this self-indulgent preamble is mainly just a way for me to say that you should follow Phil’s week-long news project, because I think it’ll be interesting. And if it is, perhaps he could actually publish his curated week’s worth of news in actual newsprint…

Name: Mac Touch. The thinking behind this is that apple doesn’t like to introduce too many neologisms, and “Mac Touch” positions the device between the iPod Touch and the Macbook – perfect, because the tablet is designed as a “gateway device”, targeted at those who have iPods and iPhones but don’t have a Mac (or even a PC) – and there are a lot of these people, believe it or not.

Operating system: Based on the iPhone, but with some added features that make it more like the regular OSX. Namely, Apple will finally have figured out a way to allow apps to run in the background, whilst maintaining performance and battery life (perhaps by some kind of special sandboxed ’standby mode’ that gives apps limited abilities to run a set number of processes in the background, such as downloading, playing audio, or updating a web server at a set interval). There will still be no file system – instead, applications can save files to one of several ‘buckets’ (eg Photos, Videos, Audio, and a new PDF/text/ebook app).

Hardware: I’m not going to bother to try and predict the exact screen size or dimensions. However, I do think the device will be notable for having no hardware ports at all. No USB sockets, no headphones socket, no display adapter. The only thing you’ll attach to the device will be a power cable. Everything else will be wireless. The device will have a camera on both sides, and the screen will be some sort of glare-resistant, low-power, read-in-daylight screen, but in colour. It’ll have Wi-Fi and mobile data access, but won’t bother with Bluetooth, infrared or RFID (as ad-hoc wi-fi networks render these mostly redundant). There won’t be a hard disk either, just solid state memory.

Apps: I think the tablet will mark the point where Apple does a bit re-jig of the iTunes/App Store system. The store will get moved out of iTunes, and will become an app in its own right. Video will move out of iTunes and into a new iPhoto app. There will also be a new app that manages text-based documents (magazines, newspapers, books, etc). The App store will be integrated into all of these. However, Apple will also allow direct download and purchase of content via third-party websites (in answer to criticism of the perceived monopoly) – however, the user experience won’t be as good (as you’ll have to re-register your credit card, etc), and Apple will rely upon this (and its library and pricing) to maintain a good market share of the digital content market. Applications can be installed from other sources too, though they come with lots of warnings and disclaimers that you have to click through. The iWork apps (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) won’t be supported, although you will be able to view the outputs from those applications (documents, spreadsheets and presentations).

Other: They’ll announce some deal so that people with an iPhone can use the same contract and data plan across both devices. You’ll finally be able to sync iPods wirelessly with the tablet (and regular Macs). You’ll be able to ’subscribe’ to magazines, TV channels/networks, and other content streams, which will give you unlimited access to download or stream their content. Crucially, if you unsubscribe, you’ll be able to keep any content you downloaded, you just won’t get any new stuff.

And there you go, I’m done. I have to admit, the predictions are based more upon what I’d like, and how I’d design it if I were in charge. But if Apple are as much of a genius as me, then I’ll be at least half right…

Amongst all the generosity from nations and peoples across the world (a UK appeal is being run by the Disasters Emergency Committee and is being promoted by Twitter, Facebook, TV ads, et al), a bunch of people are trying to directly help the aid effort by improving and updating maps of the area. How does this happen? Mostly by tracing new satellite photography and from collating existing datasets together.

Where is this happening? Well, sadly, in two separate places. On OpenStreetMap, the editable open-source map, existing community members are using their expertise and tools to update the map (including marking buildings and bridges as collapsed), with collaboration and co-ordination happening on the project page.

Google are also encouraging people to edit their Google Map of the area using their Map Maker tool and the same updated satellite photography (which comes from GeoEye). They are promoting this activity through their crisis response page, which is prominently advertised on their homepage.

I’ve no idea which site will attract the most collaborators, or which will result in the best maps. The duplication of effort does seem a little wasteful though, especially in such a time of great need, and it highlights the problems of map data in-operability and licensing issues.

See also:

• Mikel Maron: Haiti OpenStreetMap Response
• Christopher Osbourne: Haiti Earthquake Response – Mapping The Crisis

Update: A nice blog post on OpenGeoData reveals how OSM has been the ‘default’ map for some aid teams out in Haiti.

Further update: This story was also covered in the Guardian: “Meet the Wikipedia of the mapping world”.

The project is called Wordr, and it’s basically like Twitter, except that you can only post one word at a time.

This started out as a joke: I was riffing on the observation that media has gotten progressively shorter and more immediate (from long-form ‘articles’ to blog posts to tweets), and was musing on what might come next. If Twitter is for sentences (more or less), then the next level of atomisation down must be words.

Wordr would have remained a joke (even the name is silly), but late one evening, I decided to submit it to the Channel 4 innovation fund 4iP. Mainly because I’d already unsuccessfully submitted a couple of serious ideas, and was feeling a tad mischievous.

In the meantime, I’d used some of the time I spend travelling on the train back and forth to work each day to start hacking something together.

A couple of weeks later, on May 22nd, I had another train trip to Birmingham, for the launch ‘do’ of new production company Mudlark. Given that I was meant to be doing a short presentation, and hadn’t really planned anything, I thought I’d try and finish off the Wordr prototype on the train down. By the time the train pulled into the monstrous cavern of Birmingham New Street station, it just about worked. So when I got to the venu, I tentatively ‘launched’ Wordr as a website running from my laptop, available only to people in the room on the same wi-fi network. Only a few people used it, but it was kind fun, and gave us a different way to respond to the things that happened during the event.

And that probably would have been that. Channel 4 rejected the idea, on the perhaps reasonable grounds that it “doesn’t meet a well defined or quantified user need”. And so it was destined to be another half-finished side-project resting on my laptop hard-disk.

Toby Barnes, the MD of Mudlark (and agency Pixel-Lab) had other ideas though. He was busy organising Playful 2009, a one-day conference for “cross-disciplinary frolicking”, and thought Wordr might be an interesting alternative backchannel. This was important because it gave me a deadline. And deadlines are the only way I can get anything done (and even then, it’s a stretch). So I dusted off the code, fixed a few bugs, bought a domain name, got a logo designed (courtesy of Andrew Pendrick), and did all the other things you need to do to actually publish a website publicly.

The website has been running now for a couple of weeks, and I’m delighted that some other people have been game enough to join me in posting up one-word summaries of what we’re thinking, doing, seeing, or hearing (or sometimes just words that are amusing). We’ve called this “monoblogging“.

It’s still early days for Wordr, but from this very rudimentary “vocabulary cloud” of the most-used words, you can see that Britishness of the site clearly shows through, with tea, waiting, beer, pub, raining and queuing all in the top 20.

Where will it go from here? Who knows. I’m enjoying the light-heartedness and daily commentary of it all, which reminds me of how Twitter felt when I first joined (it’s become more of a semi-serious work thing now). I’m also enjoying having actually launched something for once.

As Wordr uses Twitter for registration/logging in, usernames are the same as on Twitter, and so you can follow me at @frankieroberto.

Oh yeah, and if you haven’t already done so, you should join!

Dan’s been studying and writing about an area of design he called ‘Design with Intent’ – which in a nutshell is how design can be used to intentionally influence user behaviour in a really specific way. The kind of thing his blog initially became infamous for, was documenting street furniture that was deliberately designed to be uncomfortable for homeless people to sleep on, or kids to sit on, or pink lights that show up teenagers’ acne.

More recently, he’s been looking at how these kinds of design techniques can be used for good, rather than evil – for instance, by encouraging people to use a product in a way that’s more eco-friendly.

Here’s Dan explaining himself in his own words:

(by the way, Dan’s also posted a workaround to the three pin lightbulb problem on his blog).

The workshop I participated in used Dan’s draft design toolkit, which you can download from his website (PDF poster). This identifies 6 different ‘lenses’: persuasive, visual, cognitive, security, architectural and errorproofing, each of which feature a number of different design patterns. The exercise we undertook in the workshop was to use these lenses and patterns as a stimulus for coming up with ideas to meet a number of different design briefs (including how to encourage people to close their curtains at night in order to improve insulation, for which we came up with an idea to curve the curtain-rail downwards in the middle, making curtains slightly easier to close than to open, and an idea to add a zip fastening to curtains, so that the act of closing the curtains becomes the act of zipping up your curtains, borrowing a metaphor of warm jumpers, to associate curtains more strongly with warmth and insulation properties).

After the session, I had a few beers with Dan and also with Fergus Bisset, who recently said some nice things about my Lego logos post. Among other things, we discussed whether ‘educating consumers’ was feasible or realistic, and I ranted about why we shouldn’t be lectured over and over again about turning off lightbulbs and phone chargers, when there are far bigger causes of global warming that no-one pays attention to…

It was great to meet them both, and if you haven’t already done so, go subscribe to their blogs…

However, one universe neither site coves is Lego. Okay, so the Lego Universe isn’t exactly as well documented as Springfield or Middle Earth, given that most of narrative is down to your own imagination. However, the Lego sets themselves give hints as to the type of world inhabited by minifigs. Although actually, that should really be ‘worlds’, as Lego sets come in ‘themes’, and it’s not clear whether the pirates exist in the same universe as the Power Miners gang, although I don’t see why they couldn’t.

Anyway, I thought I’d start to address this lack of understanding about the Lego Universe with a look at some of the companies and organisations that serve the Lego urban-dwelling minifigs. These mostly occur in the sets that have been variously title ‘Lego Town’, ‘Lego City’, and ‘Lego World City’ (I’m not sure whether this means there are multiple urban areas, or just one ever-growing one).

We’ll start with the law-enforcement service, the police department. Like many universes, it seems Lego isn’t without its criminal fraternity, and so the police play a vital role. They’ve been through a few different re-brands over the years, with the logo starting out fairly simple, then getting a red underline and an italicisation (for added emphasis). Then, with the advent of the Jack Stone era (named after a super-tough policeman, who inspired a generation), the logo got another re-working, featuring a word mark in a Blade Runner style font with a white upper strike-through.

The fire service, by contrast, has retained a much more unified identity, with a logo consisting of three flames elegantly arranged in a fan. Simple, concise, universal.

The ambulance and hospital service initially used the Red Cross logo, however in more recent history, the hospitals and ambulances have adopted a fetching logo featuring a white Rod of Asclepius on a blue six-pointed star. The logo is, in fact, remarkably similar to the Star of Life symbol used by some emergency medical services here in this Universe. Whether Lego copied Earth or Earth copied Lego is unknown, although it should be said that the similarities will come in handy for parallel-universe jumping time-travellers in need of medical assistance.

Onto the transportation services. These are also very important in Lego Town. In fact, I think the minifigs may spend more time travelling than they do staying put. Perhaps this is partly down to having such a reliable and comprehensive train service.

There has only ever been one train company logo, so there’s either a monopoly or else the railways are nationalised. The insignia has stood the test of time, and manages to cram a lot of symbolism into a logo small enough to be printed on train doors, liveries and even staff uniforms. It consists of a horizontal line with an arrow head at either line, and a circle with a dot inside it in the middle. The circle represents a train station, the line represents the track, and the arrows the two directions of travel. The design is similar to that of the Swiss Federal Railways, although I think it works even better. There’s an interesting contrast between these logos and that of British Rail (now National Rail), which features two parallel horizontal bars, said to represent ‘double track’, with the arrows on each track showing that trains travel on the left, like on British roads. If you follow this logic through to Lego (and the Swiss Railway), perhaps their logos show that the railways mostly run on single track?

Unlike the railways, there have been a multitude of different airline logos in Lego land – indicating a de-regulated market and open competition. The oldest airline’s logo depicts a plane taking off, on a background of rainbow-coloured stripes perhaps representing a sunset. Another airline’s tail logo features the word “Air Line” in a simple san-serif font, separated by a simple globe icon, with a red strike-through line to join the letters together. It’s a pretty simple, unsophisticated logo, suggestive of a budget airline.

The final logo is from the Lego Universe’s premier airline, which has a fleet of modern jet engine passenger planes. The elegant logo is in the form of a stylised bird in mid-flight, with wings swept out behind it. The airline uses the trademark as part of a sophisticated branding effort, with the logo applied to the tail fins and nose cones of aircraft, big enough so that they be spotted from the ground.

Finally, there’s a company that has long had a big, dominant presence within the Lego Universe. The company’s name? Octan. It’s extensive operations includes train freight wagons, and road tankers. It sponsors race tracks and has retail outlets. What does it deal in? Why, petrochemicals of course. Given that oil-derived plastic is the main construction material of the Lego Universe (as well as powering its cars and aircraft), perhaps the size of this company in unsurprising.

Octan’s company colours have always been red and green, and is has consistently employed a logo in the shape of two teardrops curved to form a oval. This form is apparently called a Tàijítú, and in our Universe is most commonly seen in the Yin and Yang symbol, as well as the flag of South Korea. What relation it has to gasoline, I have no idea. The name ‘Octan’, however, clearly derives from the chemical formula Octane, or perhaps the Octane rating measurement system.

Incidentally, there are signs that Octane is diversifying away from petrochemicals, with a move into clean energy, including wind turbines. Perhaps the Lego Universe is currently suffering from the same global warming problems as our own?

Thus concludes my round-up of the main organisations within Lego Town. I’ve missed a few more minor companies. If there’s interest, I may write these up in a future article.

Note: I’ve tried to research this article as thoroughly as possible, but I’m sure I’ve missed some things. If so, please take great delight in pointing them out via the comments below, and I’ll gladly update the article.

I was musing through my bookshelves this evening, and decided to put all the hard backs on one shelf.  Nearly all of my books are paperbacks (I’m one of those cheapskates who will always wait for the paperback to come out, 6 months or so after the initial hardback release). So the books of mine that are in hard back are all unusual in some way. Looking through them, they’re all either gifts, cookery books or non-fiction books which would never be released as a paperback.

There was something bothering me about seeing all these books together though. Lined up like that, they look a bit… garish. The spines all seem to scream for attention, as if you’re in a bookshop

That’s when an idea struck me: what would it look like if you removed all the dust jackets? Let’s see the books naked:

Much better! It turns out that beneath the dust jackets, books are bound in beautiful, desaturated colours, with neat embossed typography on the spine. Why aren’t all books displayed like this?

It turns out, according to Wikipedia’s entry on dust jackets at least, that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, dust jackets were discarded soon after purchase, as people preferred to show off the actual bookbinding.

I think we should return to these days. Leave the dust jackets, with their marketing-spiel blurbs, for the bookshops – think of them as the adverts you get stuffed inside magazines. When you get a book home, display it as it should be seen – ditch the dust jacket.

I first kicked the project off by hacking together a quick Rails-based website, mostly coded on the train to and from work whilst hurtling through the Peak District. The initial data came from a combination of a screen-scrape of the list on English Heritage’s website and some further data obtained via Freedom of Information requests – both of which had to be substantially cleaned-up.

The next step was working out what to do with the data to make it interesting, as a long list of them isn’t really that usable. A map view is the obvious thing to do. Less obvious, and slightly trickier, is to attempt to actually parse the ‘inscriptions’ written on the plaque for useful, meaningful information.

For example, the inscription ‘William Strang (1859-1921), painter and etcher, lived here 1900-1921′ tells you that there’s a person called William Strang, that he was born in 1859 and died in 1921, that he was a painter and also an etcher, and that he lived at the location of the plaque (which happens to be 20 Hamilton Terrace in London) between 1900 and 1921. As a speaker of English, you understand all this information automatically, but computers need a helping hand. Thankfully, the sentence structure of plaque inscriptions is reasonably consistant, and so I managed to write some code that parses text and produces the relevant data. The usefulness of this comes from the ability to create new index views, allowing you to browse the plaques by person (as an A-Z index), by the ‘roles’ of these people, by the years they were born on or died on (these views coming soon), or even by the ‘verbs’ used to describe their relationship to the place where the plaque is located (which you can also browse by area).

The final step towards making this more compelling was to add some photographs. Here, Flickr came to our rescue. There was already a ‘blue plaques’ group, which contained hundreds of photos. To link them together, I used special tags called ‘machine tags’, which are like normal tags except that they contain some slightly more structured data. It’s very simple though – each plaque on the Open Plaques website has an ID number (which can be found at the end of the URL), and the corresponding machine tag for that plaque is openplaques:id=999 (where 999 is the ID number). Another script then uses the Flickr API to find all the photos tagged with a relevant machine tag, checks to see if they are Creative Commons licenced, and then to displays them on the Open Plaques website, with a credit and a link back to the Flickr photo page (see an example).

There’s another benefit of using photos from Flickr too. Some of them have already been geotagged with latitude and longitude co-ordinates. The script checks this when importing the photos, and if the photo has been geotagged, but the plaque hasn’t, the co-ordinates get copied across.

This was pretty much the state of things when I went to London for the Open Hack conference/codeathon. If it had remained like this, the project might not have gone too far. As it happened, though, a group of three people (Jez Nicholson, Simon Harriyott and Marvin Baretto) had already teamed up to do something around blue plaques for their hack project. They discovered the work I’d already done, and we decided to team up. Over the course of the weekend, we added some much-needed features to the site (like maps on index pages), and even made an prototype mobile version of the website using the Yahoo Blueprint service (which I’ve since become less impressed by).

More importantly, though, we’ve continued to work together as a team to build upon and improve the website. This means collaborating on writing the code (which is open-sourced), maintaining a collective bug and feature-requests list, and even producung some documentation (okay, so that’s a little on the thin side at the moment). The fruits of this collaboration so far have been some further back-end integration with the Yahoo geolocation API, better maps, an improved editing interface, and generally a more stable service (published as a 0.2.2 release). We’ve also all worked together to improve the data, and at the time of writing, the service knows 1481 plaques, of which 52.67% have been geolocated and 32.75% have been photographed (these stats provide a nice metric against which we can measure our work).

The final part of this story is that, as of last night, Flickr have integrated with our API, so that tagged plaque photos link directly to the relevant plaque page. There’s even a little thumbnail of the website’s icon.

Where next for the website? Well, we’re always looking for more content. So if you know of any plaques that aren’t listed on the website, please let me know! There are also hundreds of plaques which haven’t yet been photographed – so you could find your area, and go out and hunt them down (and if they’re not there any more, let us know about that too).

This is still a side-project, for me and the other participants, so I can’t promise any grand improvements in functionality or design. (If you’d like to offer your time, or even funding, let me know.)

The project was also, in my head at least, a precursor to a bigger idea to encourage people to commemorate more recent individuals and events, which are perhaps more significant than some of the long-dead philanthropists and ex-Prime Ministers who are remembered on the official blue plaques. We’re still interested in this idea over at Rattle, and spent some time exploring it with 4iP (an innovation fund managed by Channel 4). Those discussions didn’t quite lead to a full commission, but there’s still a lot of interest in the idea, and we think it could be worthwhile project for someone to fund.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy browsing Open Plaques, and if you like the project, you can support the project by following @openplaques on Twitter.