Faith in the Cloud – when it all goes wrong…

Storm Clouds (photo by Flickr user Kuzeytac)

Following up on a previous blog post regarding putting faith in cloud based services comes the bombshell that popular UK based postcode search API supplier website Earnest Marples has been closed down via a Cease and Desist order from the Royal Mail. The previous post mused about what would happen if/when a service that was relied on by other services stopped and this is a prime example. Following this announcement the public service, non profit websites PlanningAlerts.com and the Straight Choice, as well as a number of others, are no longer functioning. But this has had a bigger impact still – TwitterPlan, developed by Stuart Harrison of Lichfield DC, and the Planning RSS feed and map for City of Lincoln Council are no longer available (okay, so it turns out that they do work, however their future rests in the balance of whether PlanningAlerts.com can keep running or not…) as they relied on PlanningAlerts which, in turn, relied on Earnest Marples. You get the picture.

I’m sure there are many more casualties in this but the big question is; who’s at fault? The immediate finger of blame will be pointed at the Royal Mail, being the big bad corporation behind this; there is a strong argument that postcode information is public data and, therefore, should be publically available. Earnest Marples was doing the honourable (and daring) thing in doing this; making this data usable by non profit organisations who want to provide a service that is simply not possible with this locked down data model. My personal opinion is that this data SHOULD be open and usable however the reality is that, legally, Royal Mail owns the data and has the right to charge for it and, yes, what Earnest Marples was doing was technically against the law.

So we’re now back to the question of “Should we put our faith in the clouds?”. If this is anything to go by then relying on cloud based services is a risky business indeed – sure they little to nothing to implement but once the rug gets pulled out, it’s back to the drawing board, having to invest time into fixing any broken links and damage that may have been done to services that have been put in place on the back of this. But, as people expect more of this kind of service on the web, maybe the big corporations who own this kind of data need to think long and hard about their “business model”; being seen as the bad guy is not good for your corporate image…

Check out my famous self!

Check out my famous self!

Ego time! Thanks to @EmmaMaier at the Local Gov Chronicle for re-tweeting in print a comment of mine regarding the position of Local Gov in 2014. The full comment was:

Self service – by 2014 people will need to be able to access their local-gov related data when they want it and be able to…

…make transactions online including checking balance and paying CTax, applying for Benefits and all other things. Too…

…disconnected at the moment.

Spread over three tweets. It can be found in the 19/09/09 edition of the Local Gov Chronicle, page 20 or by clicking on the piccy I’ve embedded.

It’s not going to change the world in any way, but I’m most chuffed

Learning Web Skills in Higher Education – a discussion point

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/elevatewebdesignattheuniversitylevel

I have bookmarked this with Delicious but I just wanted to draw some attention to it in a post.

One of the things I always regret about my Uni days is that the skills I learned on a couple of my courses I was never able to apply in a real life environment. One of these was the web course where, upon graduating, I had to relearn everything on my first job. Admittedly my skills increased exponentially, however I feel that the course should have provided current skills rather than the outdated stuff we actualy learned.

I have, for a couple of years, been contemplating moving into higher education as a career. Shout out in the comments; how valid do you feel that current higher education courses in web based skills currently are? What do you think is missing and how can courses be more forward thinking?

Google introduces SearchWiki

Wow; another great innovation from Google. As my boss comments frequently “Just you wait til they start charging for this stuff.” The beauty of Google’s development team is that they are not afraid to dabble and think outside of the box.

SearchWiki is no different, combining elements of standard Google searching, social bookmarking and social networking style comments into a creamy Web 2.0 search engine that is light years ahead of the competition.

The ability to promote search results to the top of a search, effectively bookmarking them, add comments for the future and even add in other web pages where they do not appear in searches, suddenly gives Google users unprescedented control over their search results; the fact that this also has an effect (albeit one that needs to be manually viewed rather than automatically affecting your personal search results) on overall results (see what other people have ranked highly and commented on) means that searching is now no longer a one way thing.

Search not turned up what you were hoping for? Don’t get frustrated, see what other people have found and commented on and you might get your answer.

I can also see massive use for this from a research point of view, combined with iGoogle’s search history tool you should never lose that “hot” site again.

Top notch, Google; just keep it free!

Show Us A Better Way

http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk

This is the first I’ve seen of this project and, being a web developer working in the public sector, I think that the concepts behind this, as well as the winning ideas, are great.

My concern, however, is the ultimate execution; it’s not clear to me whether the winning ideas will be developed into a single overarching solution (where possible) or will be developed as individual entities. If it is the later, which it seems to be, I wonder if the approach of having numerous individual sites is not defeating the object a little.

For example, I have had some involvement in Lincolnshire County Council’s MyLincolnshire site. The idea behind this is that it provides a “Do All” solution to finding public information, such as “Who is my Councillor” or “When are my bins collected?”. The data can be built on and the quality improved based on what people are looking for and the availability of said information. This gives a flexible, forward thinking solution that can grow with it’s requirements.

A lot of the solutions here fall very much into the realm of a PostCode search driven “Find my nearest…” or “Who / What is my…?” tool which raises the question; why shouldn’t we have a country wide do all tool. If MyLincolnshire can do it on a county base, using data provided by District Council’s, then surely something similar could be done for the whole of the UK. Obviously I’m not suggesting this could be achieved overnight, but with a proper minded steering group containing a number of techies, providing a user friendly front end and a back end that a layman could use, I’m sure that something could be pulled from the bag.

While this shows that the idea and indeed the impetus is there, this is a classic instance where “Out of the box” thinking is required…