31.10.10 UPDATED…
THAT didn’t really work particularly well. It was supposed to be an audio post, sent via Pixelpipe to Audioboo but seems to have gone everywhere else as well (without the audio clip).
I’ve been relying a lot more on Pixelpipe to send things in recent months, and since my phone stopped working properly, I suspect it’s going to become a really important app for me. However, this test demonstrates that I need to fix my settings and check my routing tags…

The phone saga is very annying.
My Nokia N86 flatlined a couple of weeks ago – it worked as a phone but that was about it and since I use it least as a phone it was, for me, pretty pointless.
After being sent around in circles by Carphone Warehouse for a frustrating weekend I finally found a CW shop with a Nokia Guy who could, apparently, fix it if I left it there.

Five days later the phone returned, allegedly fixed. Although actually it isn’t – the email is still not working properly.
I really don’t want to have to send it back again, and I can work around the problems by using Gravity and Pixelpipe to upload, but it’s bloody annoying that something I’m stuck with for another 12 months (and which was Not Cheap) has become flaky after 12 months. My phone is an important part of my job, and I’ve always championed Nokia (and I cannot fault the N86 camera) but, frankly, I give up.
Phew! nothing like a little mis-posted Audioboo to set off a rant, is there?

I’ve been meaning to play with Photosynth for a while… over a year actually;  Steve Clayton ran through the idea at TEDx Liverpool in 2009 but I stowed it away in the ‘things to investigate’ file and only got round to remembering it after it was mentioned again at the recent news:rewired conference.

But I have finally got round to it and, given the short amount of time it took to create one, I’m a bit peeved I didn’t try it before. (Colleagues David Higgerson and Jo Kelly have been experimenting and inspired me to have a go – you can find his reservoir synth here and Jo’s Post&Echo newsroom synth here.)

There are a couple of must-haves – an ability to run Windows on your machine and  Windows Live ID – before you can download the software but other than that you just need a collection of linked images; these were taken with my N86 at Formby beach. Photosynth software lets you select the images you want to upload, then stitches the whole thing together. There are options to add geotagging and more, plus embed and sharing abilities.

I also downloaded Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) to have a go at making a stitched panorama on my desktop: 

The N86 has the ability to stitch together panoramic shots as you go – you simply set it to ‘panoramic’ and line up your shots in accordance to the screen guides – which is actually easier than doing it on the laptop. But I do think the ICE editing options are a good extra, and I’ll definitely use it in future. I can imagine several upcoming events in Liverpool, like the Mathew Street festival – which would work well as synths and panoramas, and the extra work it takes is so small as to be negligible. For busy photographers on-the-hoof, it’s a real gift.

It was Liverpool’s first Social Media Cafe Liverpool #smcliv last night and I’d be amazed, given the way it went, if there wasn’t another one taking place very shortly.
I was one of the speakers (report of the evening will be on my work blog later today) but this post is a bit different; I wanted to write some  thoughts out of my head about data, and journalism, and how – for me, at least – it’s very easy to get lost in what makes a Really Awesome Visualisation, when what it should be about is information. Sometimes I need to remind myself, statistics are not the whole story.
When Neil Morrin, of Defnetmedia, asked me to talk at the SMC I was a little stumped for a topic as I know a lot of the social media/tech crowd in Liverpool and many of them have far more ideas about cool online stuff. They tend to build it themselves.
The idea of talking about visualisations – but with the visuals as an aid to exploring the angles of a story rather than the be-all and end-all – came about because I’d found making a couple of infographics helpful in dragging out some interesting facts behind some stats released by Knowsley council. The visuals were tools to help me see what the potential story was, not the reader – although obviously that was a spin-off. As it turned out, I think they helped me uncover a richer news story than the original data provided.

Knowsley had released findings of its March 2010 survey of Kirkby residents, who were asked for their input on the future of the town centre. The report is on the council website and I’ve also put it on Scribd to make it easier for sharing. Here’s a pie chart from the report…

The council also put up residents’ written responses, which was what I was interested; in their own words, locals were abound to be more prescriptive than they could be in a council ‘tick the box’ approach which gave them eight options.

First I put all the text into Wordle.net and refined it to give me the top 50 most repeated words. That gave me an idea of the emotion of the responses, and a hint that the comments held richer pickings than the rest of the report.
So I plotted a spreadsheet of what each resident raised (I kept the headers initially vague, and refined them as I went along and themes emerged) which was tedious and time-consuming in the extreme. But worth it; they differed to council responses in fairly significant areas – such  as being overwhelmingly in favour of keeping the Kirkby Suite and halting planned demolition, and wanting a football stadium linked to a superstore.
Neither of these issues are flagged by the council’s tick-box approach – not because Knowsley didn’t want to acknowledge them but because the suite demolition is planned, and the stadium scheme was rejected.
They are done and dusted in the world of local government – but not in the minds of those who responded to the survey. Policing – or the lack of – is another standout.

Here’s my bar chart from Swivel (interactive on the site, but – at the time of writing – not on here?)

and a pie chart from the same site (interactive here if it’s not here)

Then I hopped over to ManyEyes and made a word tree of the residents’ responses…

I used Kirkby as the starting point but if you change the phrases it gives a marvellous insight into what people want. Try ‘I would like to see‘, for example, and you get everything from the specific and wistful ‘department store selling nice clothes‘ to the rather more damning ‘you tell the truth‘.

Finally, just because I like them, I made a bubble chart

And that was it really. So, how do my infographics and the council’s pie chart differ (and does it matter?) Well, the council has order of importance thus:
Food superstore
New retail
New town square and improved public space
Improved transport links
Public services grouped together in one place
Social / evening facilities
New private sector office quarter
Improved market

From my research I found the most stated/desired things by Kirkby residents were:
Shops
Facilities (bars, restaurants, public toilets)
Keep Kirkby Suite
Environment (appearance, green spaces)
Policing
Parking
Pro-stadium
Transport links
Anti-stadium
Demolish Kirkby Suite
Other (childrens play area, OAP centre)

I think it makes interesting reading – sure, it’s not MP expenses but I got satisfaction from digging the details out – and it was a good learning experience for me. Some of the answers don’t differ wildly but aspects – for example, the strong feelings about the need to keep the Kirkby Suite and policing – give clear pointers about local feelings.
That could help really inform an editorial decision on how much space, time and effort to devote to a story – here, for example, I reckon a reporter with multimedia tools and time cleared in the diary to really spend time in Kirkby talking to people, could focus on the real needs of the area, and re-establish a bond between the paper and the area.

Statistics are amazing things and make wonderful visualisations. But they aren’t the whole story. People are the whole story, and I believe these visualisations helped me find that.

UPDATE: This is my presentation from last night

I spent an informative morning at the Mashed Libraries event in Liverpool on Friday. I don’t normally go around crashing unconferences but I’d been asked to speak, and as a result I got to sit in on some really informative and fun presentations.
The sessions I heard included Mike Nolan, Head of Web Services at Edge Hill University, who’s blogged about his presentation on what role higher education institutions play in mashups, and his belief in the need for more of the country’s academic houses to open up their data.
I loved his Data.ac.uk talk because it was delivered with real humour and insight, and it also made me realise again how many parallels there are between the newspaper industry culture shifts and that of the library sciences industry (a more lucid post on the subject is here, and it’s recommended reading).

I also saw Aidan McGuire and Julian Todd, of Scraperwiki in action and was very excited to discover they were based in Liverpool (I’m off to see them again this week to pick their brains some more). The possiblilities Scraperwiki could create (not just for journalists but of course that’s what I’m interested in) are far-reaching and within minutes of talking to Julian he’d shown me a simple way to delve into historic planning decisions for the city, and posed some interesting ideas about how to use the data.

I also saw mapping king John McKerrell taking about, well, mapping – mapme.at and APIs, which was so oversubscribed by delegates that he had to shift his talk to the main room of Parr Street Studios – and Phil Bradley, talking about Web 2.0 tools, several of which were new ones on me.

My talk was about data curation, and the importance of transparency in using, sharing and communicating information, whatever format it came in.My slides are here:

It was a 15 minute gallop through a massive subject, but I had lovely listeners for my session, and I really enjoyed myself.

I’m not normally a big fan of verbing words but today I’ve been Umapping. Or, to be more specific, I discovered a mapping tool that has a neat little online game you can make,to send users clicking  against the clock, trying to answer questions on a global or local scale.
My UMapper map – imaginatively titled How Well Do You Know Liverpool? poses questions such as ‘Where was John Lennon born’, ‘Can you find Paddy’s Wigwam‘ and – of course – where Liverpool FC and Everton FC play their home games.

The GeoDart game produced by UMapper can be as big and as clever as you want it to be. I signed up for the free basic account, and selected theGeoDart game option, using Bing Maps (which I opted for – I could also have used Google, Yahoo, or OpenStreet Maps among others) like so…

Then I gave it a name, added a description that included a summary of the rules and started adding placemarks like this:

The name of the placemark (in this case Menlove Avenue) actually displays as the answer, the question (Where was John Lennon born?) is added in the description bubble and flashes across the top of the screen as the countdown starts, like this:

As a player you then click on the map where you think John Lennon’s childhood home was, and you get points for how near you are, and how fast you are. I put this map together fairly quickly, adding placemarks to roads but not – in some cases – to the exact spot on the road where, say, a Beatle was born, but it still works well. You can also use latitude and longitude if you need absolute pinpoint accuracy.

Anyway, once completed, the map quiz looks like this and I’ve also added an embed (which you can resize as needed but I found it worked best when I played it fullscreen, rather than trying to move the map around).

It has a competitive element too; final scores are given and those who log in can save their score, challenge others via email, and compete for the top of the leaderboard.

So much for the GeoDart game; there are other reasons to love UMapper though.
I set the permissions on this to allow only myself to edit, but I could have added named editors or thrown it open to the wisdom of the crowd.
Although I only signed up for the free backage, you can upgrde to premium (own ads, custom templates, ad revenue-share) and to white label which offers an improved map editor among other options. It supports map manipultaion via the API and has a WordPress plugin (so I’m really happy I’m on Blogger, obviously) and there’s also a Drupal module.

Browsing the public maps, I found ones that collect tweets about Walla Walla , that chart something called Minimelts in Canada and where Manchester Airport-bound travellers were stranded by the volcanic ashcloud. Loads of interesting data (well, maybe not Minithingies but you know what I mean) is being collated by users, some of whom use it for sharing information, others as part of a livestreaming collection. I even found an open-edit ‘supermarkets in the Bronx’ roundup, which is excellent hyperlocal stuff.

So, UMapper is a new favourite for me; I can think of lots more GeoDart games newspapers could make, and with video, audio and still image options also available (which I didn’t use in this one)  could make it a really good, sticky, valuable tool.