Out With A Bang

There was little or no doubt what caused many a Twitter heart to flutter today and that was this…

http://traintimes.org.uk:81/map/tube/

It is a ‘live’ map of the London Underground.

If you look at the little multi-coloured flags for long enough, you will see that they do indeed move. You are watching tube trains shuttling between London Underground stations in real time.

And for many this was another ‘Wow!’ moment; proof positive that the data miners are going to rule the world; they are the ones that – in certain eyes – deliver the real gold.

Further proof that anything that combined a map with data was hot right now came in the shape of one of the 2010 Knight News Challenge winners… two boys from Riga who have created a ‘live’ map for Latvia; plotting not so much the movement of tube trains, rather a whole host of ‘news’ feeds… a Tweet from my down my street now plotted on a Google map.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/06/knight-news-challenge-gomap-riga-wont-make-much-new-just-hopefully-make-things-work-better/

They were, to their credit, swift to acknowledge the part that Adrian Holovaty had played in delivering the first, automated ‘data-as-news’ stream in the shape of his own, Knight News winner, EveryBlock.

We have, of course, been down the path of data before; why – for me – there has to be a balance between a stream of data droning on overhead and those poor grunts left on the ground trying to work out just why there were four yellow flags backed up in an orderly queue going into Marble Arch at 8.18am on the 27th June…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2009/04/23/the-lesson-comes-from-the-streets-of-baghdad-that-our-future-has-to-be-a-joint-operation-you-need-grunts-on-the-ground-you-win-no-hearts-and-few-minds-with-just-drones-in-the-air/

The danger is, of course, that you become all churlish in your dis-regard for the power of data; the fact that the Guardian can now offer a map that shows exactly where their football writers are on any given Saturday afternoon seems to me slightly beside the point… I don’t need a flag on a map to demonstrate that the reporter covering Arsenal-Everton is sat at The Emirates.

Whereas is he or she going to be? 

Data in its rawest of forms needs to be softened, to be humanised, to be tailored to a wider audience… not just those who know one end of an API from another.

‘Faces Of The Fallen’ remains a classic case in point; that was EveryBlock given a ‘face’ – tragically, the faces were those of the US servicemen and women killed on active service in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2008/06/07/faces-of-the-fallen-is-for-me-the-way-to-go-its-re-humanising-the-red-raw-data-that-holovaty-and-co-so-brilliantly-deliver-everyblock-with-a-cherry-on-top/

Which is why when I look at the live map of the London Underground, I don’t see the future… I see part of the future; its a device to be built upon… or, more ideally, written upon. For someone, somewhere to be empowered with the means to add the why to the what…

Why are those four flags backing up at Marble Arch… what’s the story there….

There is, of course, another reason why I looked at this live map of the London Underground with interested eyes.

Because as someone rightly pointed out, that data becomes most useful in the one place that you currently can’t access it… actually on the London Underground itself. Down at the end of an escalator at 11.47pm on a Friday night; wondering where the last tube home was….

For that’s the bit where the web currently fails to find a foothold because – thus far – no-one has had either the wit or the wherewithal to whack a wifi network along those same tunnels.

It is a little known fact that the Tyne & Wear Metro is all wifi’d up; you could run that in Newcastle, no worries.

For someone who is still trying to make the world wake up to the value of elegant new networks, that’s one area that fascinates me – the opportunities content and, crucially, ad-wise that would open up across a new, wifi-enabled network of the London Underground ilk.

How many people would discard their free Standard for the real-time news and information that would stream into their SmartPhones, lap-tops and tablets halfway between Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road?

That network, that platform would give that piece of raw data a proper home; a rich piece of data embedded deep amongst other pieces of networked news and information… a stream of data that would, in turn, deserve to be monetised; a useful service that would attract both eyeballs and advertisers in equal measure… advertisers that could be at once local to individual stations and national to the network…

Opening up transport network data is, equally, nothing new… this is the developers site for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in the US:

http://www.bart.gov/schedules/developers/index.aspx

And nor is seeing rail networks as a potential ‘framework’ for local journalism new either; head east for that point to be proved… http://www.eastlondonlines.co.uk/

But if we ever suspect that the challenge of the web is of such a magnitude that it forces all of us to start with a blank piece of paper and work out what networks might actually work in this new world of ours, then I think one answer may lay underground.

There lies a potential content and advertising network of, as yet, untapped possibilities; of which that Live London Underground map would be just one, integral and integrated part.