Month: May 2005

I have just download the latest update of my favourite podcast client ipodderX, which amongst other new features offers the ability to embed any digital media within a podcast.

The ability to add any enclosure to a podcast has been there from the beginning of podcasting many months ago !!!
A podcast is just a xml document in RSS format enclosing an mp3 file e.g.

<enclosure url=”http:///www.edparsons.com/test/podcasts/demo_podcast01.mp3” length=”563460” type=”audio/mpeg”/>

A podcast aggregator like ipodderX subscribes to the podcast file hosted on a server and downloads the podcast whenever it changes. The podcast can contain any digital media, videos are becoming more popular and this got me wondering – Is this a potential means of distributing geodata and in particular change only update data?

The technologies are well understood and quite robust, the sofeware already exists – I must experiment…

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Well with no great surprise the BBC has given into the 4,000 critical viewers (out of 10 million or so) and a few politicians looking for publicity and changed it’s weather maps.

The animated fly around the British Isles has been retained thankfully as this is the most effictive part, but have been ‘slowed” as not to make some viewers ill !!

It would be interesting to see the impact if the convention of putting north at the top of the screen was reversed – might keep the scots happy!

As a Nation we are just so conservative.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

After a massive amount of work behind the scenes involving many Ordnance Survey, ODPM, Local Authority and Royal Mail staff a solution to the creation of maintaining a national address database has been announced.

For those not aware of the scale of the problem, many places in Britain that don’t get mail delivered to them (e.g. Churches, Sports pavilions etc) don’t have a recognised address. A real problem if you need to get services delivered to them.

In the past, attempts to build a definitive address database have failed because they represented the view of a single organisation or industry – key to this new effort is partnership.

All the main stakeholders will be involved in the creation of the National Spatial Address Infrastructure (NSAI), insuring it meets the collective needs of the country.

There will be for sure some interesting technological challenges to solve to deliver this database as a maintained operation system, but across the stakeholder community there is a combined expertise which will ultimately deliver success.

I hope an example of joined-up government in action!!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.