Tomski.com - Tom Loosemore's Blog

It's the Internet's essential openness which confuses those who've more used to forms of media whose boundaries could be clearly discerned and thus labeled, if not policed. In the 21st century, media literacy means teaching people the skills to navigate without a map, let alone roadsigns.

Nearly fifteen years I read am article on Tom Paine in the first edition of Wired UK magazine. It changed my life.

Jon Katz's inspirational feature gave me the confidence - the belief - to walk away from a cosy career building bridges, and aspire instead to build a better future using 1s and 0s rather than concrete and steel.

Tomorrow, after a tortuous period of gardening leave, I start at Channel 4 where I'll be heading up their new 4iP fund along with the likes of the mercurial Ewan McIntosh.

The point of 4iP ? To reinvent Public Service Media for the 21st Century.

Have no poverty of ambition, as a wise man once advised me...

I can't wait to get started.

Just went live in beta at maps.met.police.uk

It's a pretty decent first effort, in that the data is down to a nicely local level (typically half a dozen streets) and aggregates geographically (so you can see basic crime data for the streets near you, for your ward, for your borough and for London as a whole).

I had lots of fun working with Schulze & Webb on what an ideal crime map might entail while on secondment to the Cabinet Office. I was impressed with many of the people I met at the Met. They know crime data. They know geography.

The biggest missed opportunity is the lack of proper profile for your local coppers (aka your "Safe Neighbourhood Team"). The site should make it dead easy for your to contact them, and challenge/shape their priorities.

After all, even coppers work for you...

I love postcodes. Nearly everyone knows theirs, they cover most locations of interest, and their dozen-household level of granularity is a geographic sweet spot. They should be seen as a massive global competitive advantage for UK PLC.

So I'm delighted to see the Royal Mail doing the right thing, and allowing people entering the ShowUsABetterWay.com government data re-use competition to have access to the full postcode PAF dataset.

Well done, Royal Mail. As these things go, it's both a brave and sensible move.

Full disclosure: I'm on secondment to the Cabinet Office, helping their Power of Information Taskforce, for whom I've helped set up ShowUsABetterWay.com

On Saturday I gave a talk outlining some slightly bonkers 'future of TV' ideas (aka The Impossibox) to the wondrously clueful crowd gathered at OpenTech 2008.

The Impossibox is an idea for a network of PVRs acting as a giant, ever-growing Storage Area Network with enough capacity to store - and then seed via BitTorrent to each and every PVR-cum-node- all the decent TV programmes broadcast in the UK. The launch of FreeSat makes the maths even more compelling, as (bit-level) identical copies of programmes can be captured off-air by any FreeSat PVR, be it in Aberdeen or Plymouth. Hence the cloud is better seeded than for Freeview transmissions, whose time signals will differ slightly depending on the transmitter.

My slides are below, or (downloadable here).

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Update: I should have made it clear - as I did at OpenTech - that I gave this talk in a personal capacity, not wearing my Ofcom hat. (In fact I first gave this talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in 2007, when I still worked at the BBC).

For the past couple of months I've been on secondment for 2 days a week to the Cabinet Office, working with the likes of Richard Allen on the Power of Information Task Force.

Earlier this week Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson launched Show Us A Better Way, a competition with a £20k prize fund to develop the best ideas suggested by the public for products which re-use public data. We also released a couple of new APIs and data dumps. ("After all, public data is your data.")

The response has been, well, really rather good.

I have but one niggle. While Tom and I have been getting lotsa props, the people who worked hardest and longest on all this were getting none of the credit, for the dumb reason that they're civil servants, and therefore, convention dictates used to dictate, must remain nameless.

Well, stuff that. The Cabinet Office just published new social media guidelines enabling all UK civil servants to be normal human beings outside, as well as inside, the government firewall.

So, Richard Stirling, John Sheridan, William Perrin and others - I salute you.

I've long wanted House of Commons debates made available in ways which take best advantage of the wonders of t'Interweb. The accessibility and searchability of the web transforms our ability to hold our elected representatives to account for their actions in Parliament.

First TheyWorkForYou.com worked its magic with the text of Hansard, and now the mySociety folk have added video to the mix, courtesy of footage from BBC Parliament and some clever crowdsourcing of the necessary metadata.

Unlike Parliament's own 28-day video archive (or BBC Parliament), the TheyWorkForYou video will persist, and thus our democracy is now pleasingly embeddable. John Wilkes would have approved.

By way of example, here's George Osborne getting stuck into the Chancellor about a recent OECD report on the UK economy.

After less than a week volunteers had matched 10,000 speeches to the accompanying video clip.

So head over here to help match the remaining 25,000 - though be warned, it's surprisingly addictive once you get started.

Stephen Dunn and I were lucky enough to win the 'Best Cruise' award for our annotated Flickr photo story of our East Coast cruise in June 2007. Not sure how many at the Wanderer Class Association AGM knew what Flickr was, but they seemed enthusiastic nonetheless...

I've spent much of the past 6 months immersed in the whys and wherefors of Public Service Broadcasting.

This morning Ofcom - my employer - published the review's first phase.

I'm glad to say that we've managed to hack up a web version of the review's Exec Summary. This let's you link to and comment on each paragraph, as well as follow links to supporting evidence.

It might work, it might not. Either way, it's a cheap way to explore new ways to broaden access to a public consultation. It's an idea I tried and failed to get the BBC to go for at the time of the publication of Building Public Value, the BBC's Charter Review manifesto published in 2004. Times change, in a good way.

More traditionally, we also just launched a PSB Review blog so we can join the conversation across the wider web about the future of public service broadcasting in the uK.

With a fair wind, I might even get the CEO to post...