As part of my quest to ensure I have a reasonable backup of all my social media data, I've been investigating ho easy it is to export photos from TwitPic. I've been using TwitPic since 2008 and have uploaded 1,200 images there. There's no official export function for TwitPic. The services which used to exist…
Continue reading →Opt Out of Klout - Now!
by | | 20 comments | Read ~22,973 times.Sites like Klout and Kred are perfect examples of social media frippery. A vaguely plausible "score" that you can use to justify your "investment" in tweeting all day long. When they're used as a silly little badge, or an informal competition with friends, they're a (mostly) harmless way of gamification. Of continual annoyance is the…
Continue reading →OpenTech 2013
by | | 5 comments | Read ~283 times.Another year - another OpenTech! See blog posts from 2010 and 2011. It feels like every year the event gets bigger and better. It's still the same crowd of politically aware techies, and it still costs a ridiculously cheap fiver to come along, and the talks were of an abnormally high quality. Here are my…
Continue reading →Are Megabytes Meaningless To Customers?
by | | 1 comment
This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer.. Pop quiz: How many MB did you use watching that YouTube video? When dealing with data usage, a familiar cry in the telco world is “Customers just don’t understand what a MB is!” Is this true? The theory goes something…
Continue reading →Surrey Police and the Case of The Misleading Pie Charts
by | | Read ~906 times.
Surrey County Council have sent every household in the county a booklet explaining how our council tax is being spent. Within it is a highly political comment from Kevin Hurley, the newly elected Police and Crime Commissioner. He presents a pie chart showing how the police force spend its money. Take a look at it…
Continue reading →Rewired State - UK Parliament 2012
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This weekend, I went to Rewired State's Parliament hackday. I teamed up with amazing front end designer Max Bye and statistician par excellence John Sandall to create a data visualisation of Parliament's Demographics. Are the houses representative of the people in terms of gender diversity? Are the Labour Party younger than the Conservatives? Are the…
Continue reading →The Death Of The BlackBerry
by | | 7 comments | Read ~795 times.
For years I was a BlackBerry fanboy. I remember snatching a departing colleague's 6710 and lying to the IT department that I was authorised to have my email on my phone. I never looked back. Despite a brief flirtation with the Nokia N95 - I was a BlackBerry Boy through and through. Until this happened.…
Continue reading →OpenTech 2010
by | | 8 comments | Read ~250 times.
A quick report on OpenTech 2010 - the London event for geeks interested in Government data, openness and generally doing good things with tech and data. I attended last year's event which inspired me to create my "VoteUK" service for the 2010 general election. I had considered doing a talk about the trials and tribulations…
Continue reading →Unlimited?
by | | 3 comments | Read ~134 times.
ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET* *One plate only, limit of half a sausage per person, no refills, persons weighing over 75Kg will have to pay a supplement, does not include ice-cream. Doesn't really seem fair, does it? The Internet industry loves to abuse the word "Unlimited" - the mobile industry is particularly bad. Despite complaints…
Continue reading →Free Our Postcodes
by | | 2 commentsVoteUK is no more. In order to precisely show you where your electoral registration office was, I needed to take its postcode and covert it to latitude and longitude. That's the service Ernest Marples provided. A few days ago, the Post Office - in their infinite wisdom - set their legal dogs on those running…
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