Mapumental
I've been playing with Mapumental, a beta of the new service from mysociety,the people who have brought us such wonderful services as TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.
Mapumental is a service which takes a UK postcode and generates a map which shows a number of interesting things. First, it highlights all locations on the map which are within one hour of travel time by public transport to your chosen postcode. The clever bit is that there is a slider at the top which allows you to choose your acceptable travel time; the map is redrawn dynamically.
Second, the map can be set up to highlight areas where the average house price is below a certain threshold. So, if you were looking for a new house, you could put in the post code of you work, or your mum's house, or anywhere you have to regularly go, set your acceptable travel time, set your acceptable average house price, and the map would highlight areas for you to investigate.
The last bit of information it shows is 'scenic-ness'. They have a database of attractiveness ratings for areas, drawn from some sort of hot-or-not type site for places. So you can throw in a criterion on how scenic your new home will be too.
Mysociety imagine it being used to plan house moves and to investigate job changes. A commenter on their blog suggests it would also be useful for holiday planning. My principal use for it so far has been as a toy. In this regard it performs excellently. Some of my observations (mostly banal) so far:
- If I wanted to work within 30 minutes of home, I am limited to a very small corner of south east London, most of it pretty deprived. This supports the feeling I've always had that getting anywhere in London takes about an hour.
- You should see the way the heart of Westminster and Kensington are eaten out as soon as you put any constraint on house price at all. This means that the average house price in these areas is over £998,000. Ouch.
- The price I paid for the flat I have in Blackheath, which I considered financially crippling, is actually well below the average for the area, which seems to be well over £300k.
- In Scotland, you can cover a much wider area in the same travel time. However, unlike in London, places which are simply unreachable by public transport become a factor.
- Many of the scenic-ness ratings seem to be eccentric to say the least. I wonder about their sample sizes.
If you're interested you can request access to the beta from their website. Mine came through in about a week.
The wonderful thing about this service is that it sets free data that is out there and makes it useful to ordinary people. The depressing thing about it is that mysociety has had to pay rather a lot of money to get access to the necessary data. Many would say that it should be free - the data was gathered by our government, after all, so in a sense it is already 'ours'. This system seems to work out okay in the US, where databases don't get intellectual property protection and nor does anything produced by the federal government.
I'm not quite convinced by that argument. If data collection and maintenance is funded by the fees gathered from users, the taxpayer hasn't, in fact, already paid for it. It has been gathered at nil net cost to the taxpayer. Despite that there is a lesson on the undesirability of monopoly providers: Mapumental has no house price data in Scotland because the Scottish land registry were charging ten times more for the data than in England and Wales.
Anyway, if you haven't tried mysociety's services I'd encourage you to have a look. They are what the internet should be about: freeing up information and turning it into useful, collaborative services which make the world better.
Mapumental is a service which takes a UK postcode and generates a map which shows a number of interesting things. First, it highlights all locations on the map which are within one hour of travel time by public transport to your chosen postcode. The clever bit is that there is a slider at the top which allows you to choose your acceptable travel time; the map is redrawn dynamically.
Second, the map can be set up to highlight areas where the average house price is below a certain threshold. So, if you were looking for a new house, you could put in the post code of you work, or your mum's house, or anywhere you have to regularly go, set your acceptable travel time, set your acceptable average house price, and the map would highlight areas for you to investigate.
The last bit of information it shows is 'scenic-ness'. They have a database of attractiveness ratings for areas, drawn from some sort of hot-or-not type site for places. So you can throw in a criterion on how scenic your new home will be too.
Mysociety imagine it being used to plan house moves and to investigate job changes. A commenter on their blog suggests it would also be useful for holiday planning. My principal use for it so far has been as a toy. In this regard it performs excellently. Some of my observations (mostly banal) so far:
- If I wanted to work within 30 minutes of home, I am limited to a very small corner of south east London, most of it pretty deprived. This supports the feeling I've always had that getting anywhere in London takes about an hour.
- You should see the way the heart of Westminster and Kensington are eaten out as soon as you put any constraint on house price at all. This means that the average house price in these areas is over £998,000. Ouch.
- The price I paid for the flat I have in Blackheath, which I considered financially crippling, is actually well below the average for the area, which seems to be well over £300k.
- In Scotland, you can cover a much wider area in the same travel time. However, unlike in London, places which are simply unreachable by public transport become a factor.
- Many of the scenic-ness ratings seem to be eccentric to say the least. I wonder about their sample sizes.
If you're interested you can request access to the beta from their website. Mine came through in about a week.
The wonderful thing about this service is that it sets free data that is out there and makes it useful to ordinary people. The depressing thing about it is that mysociety has had to pay rather a lot of money to get access to the necessary data. Many would say that it should be free - the data was gathered by our government, after all, so in a sense it is already 'ours'. This system seems to work out okay in the US, where databases don't get intellectual property protection and nor does anything produced by the federal government.
I'm not quite convinced by that argument. If data collection and maintenance is funded by the fees gathered from users, the taxpayer hasn't, in fact, already paid for it. It has been gathered at nil net cost to the taxpayer. Despite that there is a lesson on the undesirability of monopoly providers: Mapumental has no house price data in Scotland because the Scottish land registry were charging ten times more for the data than in England and Wales.
Anyway, if you haven't tried mysociety's services I'd encourage you to have a look. They are what the internet should be about: freeing up information and turning it into useful, collaborative services which make the world better.