Blackkettle

IWR Blog – information industry insight from www.iwr.co.uk – Individual Archives
and
The Graun

The Ordnance Survey, those charged with measuring the British Isles, seem to have a particularly backward view of the internet and the democratisation of content. For now, it’s really annoying. Genuinely white-hat projects are getting canned because the OS is stuck in the (relative) dark ages. Five years from now, it won’t make a blind bit of difference. Either they will have opened up, or they will have been supplanted as the primary open mapping service in the UK – if not over the whole UK then at least in London. In that time I expect Google to have photographed everything, and someone’s bound to come along and do something very clever with Photosynth to get high-accuracy metrics out of those images.

Even if it’s not Google that does it, the market pressure is high enough that someone is going to offer the service that the OS doesn’t want to, and it’s only going to get cheaper for them to do it as time goes on.

IWR Blog – information industry insight from www.iwr.co.uk – Individual Archives
There’s a gloriously enticing quote in this article about harnessing creativity.

The trick is to ensure that an environment is established where it’s okay to dream and definitely okay to share and where curiosity and creativity are a continuous backdrop to real life.

Yes, please.

Also, I really want to know what the top-secret approach mentioned in the first paragraph is. If it can put an end to those “just can’t think of anything worth thinking about” mornings… well, yes please to that too. Being a one-man-band, I can’t help but think that my creativity suffers somewhat from the lack of day-to-day interaction with people directly on my wavelength.

This is good for a giggle, from Metafilter:

Why FireFox is Blocked
How to block FireFox
FireFox is now blocked from this and many of my other sites

The short story: disgruntled webmaster blocks FireFox because he notices that AdBlock can’t be detected, because “Accessing the content while blocking the ads … would be no less than stealing.” Then he procedes to mount a mini-crusade against internet thieves

Bollocks to that.

Get it into your skulls, content providers: this is my computer, and I will decide what it does. If you decide that by exercising that right I shouldn’t be allowed access to your content, so be it, but please, drop the righteous indignation. Calling me a criminal is hardly likely to endear me to your cause.