The UK’s Ordnance Survey create some of the World’s best maps. Going far beyond mapping just the roads, OS provide some of the most detailed mapping, good for walkers, cyclists and runners too. The problem is, that the OS has some onerous licensing restrictions that make it impossible for a lot of services to use their maps. The ‘mashup’ culture has largely had to get along without the help of the OS, with Google Maps being the data source that a lot of companies work with. Some time back, Google even tried to strike a deal with OS to use their UK maps, but it foundered.

One emerging alternative to OS is the Open Steet Map Project (OSM), which is trying to build its own mapping database for the UK. The idea is simple, regular folk go out and map the landscape using their own GPS devices, and gradually a network of roads, footpaths and waterways emerges.

Nestoria’s Ed Freyfogle told me an interesting story about OSM, of a Durham University student, Gregory Marler, who decided to live his student life without using any copyrighted maps. At the time he started in Durham, the town was more-or-less a blank space in terms of the OSM project, and so he set out to help create the map for the town. Gregory’s blog, Living With Dragons, takes its name from ancient maritime maps which might mark the unknown with “Here be Dragons”. You can read an interview with Gregory on the Nestoria Blog. The Open Street Map project is doing very well now, and recently celebrated the completion of mapping of Brighton.

The Guardian newspaper has started its own Free Our Data campaign, as it’s not just the OS that’s the problem. Many previously Government-run services have been privatised and allowed to take their data with them into the private sector, even though taxpayers’ money was used to create the databases. In many cases, Government subsidies are still paid, so some of these companies can get paid both ways. Postcodes are an often-cited example: the UK post codes database belongs to Royal Mail, and they make it expensive to license. Of course many products and services allow postcode-to-map lookup (e.g. sat nav and many online sites), which they must pay Royal Mail for. Here there are user-led projects like the New Poplar Edition and Free the Postcode, that are encouraging users to provide their own data mapping postcodes to map location, so that eventually a free and open database will exist.

It’s not all negative for the Ordnance Survey, though. The Geograph project is a project to collect at least one photograph for every OS map square in the UK. OS maps are split into 1km squares, with each square having its own reference number, for example the centre of Heathrow airport is at TQ0775. The OS are official sponsors of the Geograph project, and allow Geograph use of their maps as part of the site. I think this is the kind of activity we want to see OS involved in, and it doesn’t mean selling fewer maps, but rather selling more; I’ve contributed pictures to Geograph myself and consequently bought more OS maps in the last 3 years than I did in the previous 10. Let’s see the OS embrace the web mashup culture more: come on guys let’s have some more licensing flexibility from you.

Sydney, Australia-based telephony services company Voxalot have launched their own free calling utility for Facebook, VoxCall. Signing up to VoxCall gives you free calling to other FB users (that have also installed the utility), has conference rooms to setup multi-party conferences, and also gives you a click-to-call button on your FB profile.

Facebook is starting to build quite a useful list of apps in this space now, with a variety of buttons to access external services (e.g. Skype), and useful conferencing and voicemail services from the likes of iotum and FWD. In the case of VoxCall, the button is an interface to a VoIP service provider that already provides a range of value-added services to Internet Telephony Services Providers (ITSPs) all over the planet. If you already have a SIP URI, then signing up for VoxCall takes only a few seconds, including a test call that they make to check that it’s really your phone; you answer the call and enter the PIN code they display on FB, then you’re signed up. A SIP URI, if you haven’t come across that, is the native addressing system used for phones in the SIP/VoIP world; instead of a telephone number, a URI is an identifier that looks like an email address, e.g. sip:fred@voxalot.com, that you can use to dial and connect VoIP phones together. In many cases, ITSPs provide both SIP URIs and telephone numbers that ring to the same phone. Often the SIP URI has the number embedded into it, so when I tested Voxalot one of the things I tried was my Truphone account. My Truphone number starts with 07978, so there is a matching URI 447978xxxxxx@truphone.com that works with Voxalot.

VoxCall is a nice little utility, free to use, and as Voxalot point out themselves it’s pretty convenient because your FB friends can click to call you without needing to know which number is being used under the covers. This means you can switch numbers (e.g. from landline to Truphone) whenever you like, and the calls will still get through without you having to tell anyone.

If you use Firefox or Flock then you probably use browser extensions and one of the most useful is greasemonkey which enables end users to write (Java)Scripts to further customise/personalise their favourite web applications.

I use several scripts already for Gmail, Linkedin, Plaxo, twitter and I recently added a few new Facebook scripts.

1. Scriptt (small - 4kb) makes pages load faster, enlarges image thumbnails, has a dynamic application remover, removes ads, and displays ages.

thumbnail: right click on any thumbnail in any album / profile and it will appear bigger on the top left of the screen (with description if available). then left click the blown up image and it will hide once again.

app remover: this creates an “x” on the top right of every application. when clicked, it hides the application and adds it to a database of applications to be hidden in every profile. also, by clicking the app icons (under the profile picture) it un-hides the desired app and removes it from the database. to completely clear the database, click on “reset appkill” in the user script command menu. note: this does not hide applications on your profile page, only on others’

ad remover: removes the facebook flyer ads under the application menu. There are many of these type of scripts. A few of the newer scripts also block social ad requests.

age checker: displays age of person next to their birthday for the numerically challenged.

and, of course, if you want to disable any of the above features, just edit the userscript and set the respective boolean to “false”

2. Other Facebook scripts I found include one that added microformat markup to any Facebook profile. Then by using the Operator plugin for Firefox/Flock you can detect the microformat markup and use more action scripts to utilise the data further. For example I could plot a Facebook friend on a Google Map or add them to my address book.

Tom Morris has also created an Operator action script for Skype, so you can directly call a Facebook contact via Skype. You can read about it and download it at http://tommorris.org/blog/.

There are plenty of other scripts such as the remove the “is” status annoyance but if you come up with or know of other useful scripts please let us know.

Like many friends, I now prefer using twitter to share comments about blog posts, instead of writing a comment directly on the blog itself. The reason I prefer twitter is simply because I can have an immediate conversation about my discoveries (TinyURL) and thoughts with my social network. Yet part of me would still love to let the original blog author know what I think about their post, via a twitter trackback mechanism but is that possible?

Sadly, following an extensive search, I only found several wordpress to twitter and twitter to blog tools that enable me blog and automatically update/display my status. I also found twitter to Facebook and Skype but I didn’t find a twitter (comment) trackback solution.

So I re-read how trackbacks work and I also re-read the Twitter API documentation.

The HTTP-post similarities and support for hAtom between blogs and twitter made me think it must be possible. All that is missing is a twitter XML-RPC post mechanism to ping the originating blog using a trackback (Tiny) URL. i.e I could write my twitter post and then before I send it out, I would manually cut and paste the trackback URL into twitter. The twitter XML-RPC ping notification service would then alert the originating blog post.

I would love to see this functionality added by Twitter (otherwise a Greasemonkey or Operator Script would do fine ) because I think it would increase the conversational index for many blog sites which has drifted away to twitter and the like. This proposed twitterback solution got me thinking what else would I like to see in twitter.

The recent discussions about the social graph and the launch of twitterposter made me wonder if I could change my friends list to become my personal twitterposter i.e twittergraph which would show certain friends images larger either to reflect their influence i.e number of followers or better still the number of times I have communicated them directly either via an @ or d call.

Property hunting site Nestoria have just teamed up with Sportsbase to provide house hunters with details of the sports facilities surrounding their potential new home. Once you’ve searched an area with your house criteria, it’s now possible to click on a ’sports’ tab, which adds some extra pins to the map, showing the nearby sports facilities. Clicking on the sports links takes you to the Sportsbase site for a more detailed view. A quick town search throws up my own beloved Aikido club, which at least proves that even obscure sports are covered…

While I’ve been over in San Francisco for CTIA (see Blognation USA), the October ‘Third Tuesday’ event in Edinburgh was going on. Christine Gupta popped this quick report in by email for you all…

Last night’s 3rd Tuesday was voted a big success by all who attended, Microsoft Silverlight team included. We had 53 attendees including several digital agencies - Union Digital, Line Marketing, Lightershade and more.

Jon Harris, the Microsoft User Experience Evangelist kicked off his presentation with the observation that MS is about to be ‘no longer tumbleweed blowing through the designer sector’. He spoke about the traditional clash of designers and developers who until now have both spoken different languages. He’s predicting 250-300 million downloads of Silverlight in 18 months to give them 80% penetration. Wouldn’t give a roadmap as they say it’s changing monthly according to feedback. Right now the design tools are for Windows only, but interoperability will increase with future releases.

Currently they’re working on showcase projects with 40 London agencies and their channel development manager Emma Bateson is working hard to matchmake agencies and Silverlight business partners. Simon Robson from Union Digital and Ross Laurie from Line Marketing are both keen to provide showcase projects for Scottish creativity with Silverlight.

Edinburgh’s Third Tuesday meetings continue to gather pace and some great guests. The next meeting will be this week in Home House at 7.30pm.

As always there will be time mix and mingle before the main presentation, which this month is from a team at Microsoft, including Emma Bateson, Solution Channel Development Manager. We’re told that topics will include the user experience, and new technologies including the Silverlight rich internet application framework for developer. This is a good step from Microsoft as the central belt of Scotland (Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow) are becoming strong players in some of the Web 2.0 spaces, including casual online gaming.

Head over to the Third Tuesday Calendar to RSVP.

Following the success of BarCamp Sheffield and hot on the heels of Mashup Manchester, OpenCoffee Manchester and the announcement of Project Sahara, comes BarCamp Leeds.

Registration is now open and all tickets are free!

Some of the purposed topics include:

• From start-up to £67m in 10 years - passing on the wisdom and hopefully not the pain - Lee Strafford
• From startup to £45m in 8 years (Learn from my mistakes or Launching BT BizBox a small business CRM solution in 5 weeks - Dean Sadler
• Podcasting For Fun And Hopefully Profit - Dominic Hodgson or
• Simple SEO and i’d like to do a site clinic where people show there sites and we do an quick seo report on them and give them some tips
• Why big companies are missing a trick by ignoring social media - Ian Green
• Ladybank Company of Distillers - building a real co-creation business through the internet - Ian Green
• Unleashing social media and technology for the good of local communities - Stuart Bruce
• From Zero to Game in 30 Minutes - Tom Scott (also possibly up for running Powerpoint Karaoke if folks are interested)

LinkedIn have just reached the landmark of 1 million members in the UK, with a worldwide total now of 15 million. To celebrate they have created a web badge that UK users can add to their profiles, styled like a London street sign. Facebook, so much in the news recently even in the broadsheet papers in the UK claim 48 million members. Even with these two giants of the personal/business network there seems to be no end of other services to choose from, including Xing, Plaxo etc. Don’t get too obsessed with making connections though: remember that social networking “friends” are not like real friends. A real friend is someone that would help you with a dead body…

I look forward to getting my new “officially” unlocked iPhone from Orange (France), hopefully when I am at Le Web.

The rumour is that Apple will also launch a new 3G version of the iPhone after Christmas around the sametime as the new SDK which comes out in February. The video below is a humourous look at what else the new and improved iPhone might be able to do.