An open letter to Facebook, about their broken microformats

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Dear Facebook,

Thank you for adding an hCard microformat to my profile on your site.

However, it’s broken, as you can see in this screenshot, made using the debugger in the superb ‘Operator’ add-on for Firefox:

Microformat contains bogus "org" and "title" properties and no ""URL" or "email" properties

My Facebook profile, with broken hCard microformat shown in Operator toolbar's debugger

You need to fix some things:

  • I am not an organisation, so please remove the org property (you may have some user accounts for organisations, contrary to your own polices. That’s their, and your, problem — individual users are by far the majority).
  • The names of six of my friends, chosen by you at random, are not my titles. My title is currently “Mr”. (I say currently; it might change to “The Right Honourable”, if ever gets to be PM and I threaten to publish the pictures).
  • Add class="url" and rel="me" to my web addresses, This is probably the single most useful thing you could do for me right now. Unless you like ironing.
  • Add class="email" to… oh, you guessed, To my e-mail address; that’s right. I’m sure that won’t be hard to do.
  • Add a machine readable date and mark up my birthday as such: I might get more cards if you do.
  • Mark up my address as such, or at least as a label.

If you do this for me, I promise not to refer to you as “Farcebook” again. Until the next time you screw up, that is.

All the best

Andy
— x —

Open local public spending data – a potential hitch

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There is — quite rightly, in my autocratic and what-does-humble-mean-anyway opinion — a move to have public bodies publish details of every item of spending over £500. I won’t go into the arguments about this, nor the technical issues, because that’s already been done by wiser heads than mine, Oh, OK, wise heads including mine (see comments on the latter document).

However, one thing in particular concerns me. Sometimes, a body — a local council, say, like, but not specifically, the one I work for — will receive grant funding for a project or activity. Such money usually comes with conditions attached.

Now, suppose this funding has two parts: £99,000 to do something which benefits the community as a whole, and £1,000 which must be spent on something seemingly trivial; say, publicising the activity by producing beermats. No beermats; no £99,000 to spend on a worthwhile activity. Such things do happen, if not literally demanding beermats.

Suppose that £1,000 spend is then published, along with hundreds of other items of expenditure. The finance office of the council will not know about the grant funding, or the conditions attached to it, nor do they need to. They will just add an entry to a database, saying “Acme Beer Mats, 1 April 2011: £1,000”, which will then be made available with all the other enteries in that database, as open data

Along come the Daily FMail and the Taxpayer’s Alliance, and before you know it, the media and (ironically, given my frivolous example) bar-rooms up and down the country are full of “Borsetshire Council wastes money on beermats extravaganza on the rates[sic]” headlines.

No doubt the authority will put out a subsequent press statement pointing out the £99,000 of benefits, the unavoidability of the attached conditions, and so on. And no doubt it will receive little if any press attention.

What can council’s do to prevent this scenario? Annotate every spend item in their published data? Surely impractical. List such items separately? I don’t know (and don’t get me wrong, I’m an open-data advocate; and this is a relatively minor matter, which shouldn’t stop such data from being published), but do I hope somebody has an answer.

Over to you…

Footnote: thanks to for encouraging me to blog my rambling comments on this, made during our earlier discussion.

More police forces should publish web pages about wildlife crime officers

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I maintain the West Midland Bird Club website. The club serves the four English counties of Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and the Metropolitan West Midlands, and so I wanted to write a little bit about the work of the relevant police services’ Wildlife Liaison Officers (WLOs), and to link to web pages about each of them.

I was surprised to find that none of their websites have a page about their WLOs, or their approach to wildlife crime in general. So I started to look at other forces’ sites, and found very few of them did.

What I Wanted

I decided it would be a good idea to collate a list of the few good examples that exist and conversely the forces which don’t have such a page, not least to encourage them to provide one.

A quick Google search showed that no such list is already in place, so my next step was to check — on Twitter, of course — whether anyone else was working on one. The answer was no, but two projects have more generic lists of police websites and related details in hand: OpenlyLocal and Podnosh.

I decided that I would have to make the list happen for myself, but I wasn’t going to do all the work. of OpenlyLocal kindly offered use of his data on police forces and their home pages and other contact details — it’s open data, under a CC license. That was in XML, though, and I lack the skills to manipulate it, so Chris kindly and quickly provided a dump into CSV format, suitable for use in a spreadsheet. A salutary lesson, there, to anyone publishing open data. While RDF and linked data is the way to go, so that it can be parsed and processed by machines in an sophisticated way, making a format like CSV available as well opens that data up to less technically-gifted users.

How I Did It

I copied the relevant columns from Chris’ document into my own, and made the editable spreadsheet available in Google Docs, for anyone to edit. I then blogged about it, inviting people to help me to full the missing column of wildlife crime pages. I was quickly retweeted by several people and organisations (thank you for that) and, significantly, the initiative was mentioned on the Guardian website by . This resulted in spate if activity, with most of the rows completed within a day or so after the mention. Interestingly, the spreadsheet filled up from the top, so it seems that unknown volunteers were helping with the first gap they came to, rather than that for their local force, which is what I had expected.

A few people shoe-horned prose comments into the URL column, so I added a “notes” column and moved their comments there.

After a few days, only a couple of gaps remained, so I filled these myself, and locked the spreadsheet prevent vandalism (any amendments may be posted below, as comments).

Findings

So, whet did we find? Of 51 forces, only 29 have a wildlife crime page — and some of those are patchy. Other forces don’t have one, but mentioned the work of their WLOs in press releases, progress reports and policy or strategy documents — sometimes in PDF files.

In some cases, a search of the force’s website for “wildlife” returns no result at all — a disappointing state of affairs.

PC Duncan Thomas, Wildlife Liaison Officer with Lancashire Constabulary

On the other hand, there were some great examples of best practice, including Lancashire Constabulary, Merseyside Police and North Yorkshire Police, from which other forces can learn. Note that they variously make use of video, and have links to wildlife conservation bodies.

Also of interest is this , reproduced on Coldean Residents Association’s hyperlocal site.

What next

This is what I hope will happen now:

  • Each police force should set up a locally-relevant web page about wildlife crime and their response to it, with relevant contact details, modelled on the best practice we found.
  • These pages should have short, permanent URLs so that links to them will not decay when forces change their technology
  • A central police website could ask an enquirer their postcode or address (or simply geo-locate their browser), and type of concern, then return the relevant page (whether it’s about wildlife crime, drug dealing or lost property) using the model adopted by LocalDirectGov
  • Websites listing details of all UK police forces’ details — like OpenlyLocal and Podnosh — could include their wildlife crime URLs
  • Wildlife websites with pages for each county (for example, Fatbirder, BirdGuides etc) could include the relevant forces’ wildlife links.
  • Local wildlife organisations (Wildlife Trusts, county bird clubs, RSPB Local Groups) should link to their local forces’ wildlife page

How you can help

  • Publicise this blog post and the open data that’s been genreated
  • Make use of that data
  • Write to your local force, if they don’t already have a page, and ask them to provide one — feel free to send them the URL of this post
  • Ask your councillor to encourage the local force to do so
  • Ask your local Wildlife Trust, bird club or related organisation to do the same
  • Let everyone know about the results, in the comments below, or with a pingback from your own blog post

I’ll notify national organisations like the RSPB, RSPCA and British Trust for Ornithology.

Meanwhile, if you wish to report wildlife crime in progress, call 999, or otherwise report it to Crimestoppers (who will treat the report as anonymous if you wish) on 0800 555 111.

Thank you

Finally, thank you to everyone who’s contributed to this project, to date.

Updates

20 August 2010: was missed, because it was on a separate site, where their site’s search didn’t find it. It’s now been moved to the main site, as a result of this post.

3 September 2010: Northumbria Police pages created in response to this campaign.

June 2011: Staffordshire Police page created in response to this campaign (per their e-mail).

I can teach HTML. Well.

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I enjoy talking about, and teaching people to use, valid, semantically-meaningful and accessible HTML. I don’t get to do the teaching very often, so, after running a session on the correct use of HTML tables, it was heartening today to receive a complimentary e-mail from an attendee. Having little modesty, I’m going to share part of it with you:

Just wanted to say thank you for the training this week… The subject of making our pages accessible for customers is a very important one, we will now make changes to the way in which we load our pages ensuring that we meet these standards… We found it very informative, interesting and unlike other training we’ve been on we didn’t walk out of there completely baffled, which is an accomplishment on your part, as the majority of us are not familiar with HTML.

Google Maps’ microformats: unhappy anniversary – still broken after three years

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Three years ago today — on 31 July 2007 — Google proudly announced that they had added hCard microformats to Google Maps, so that, as they put it:

your browser can easily recognize the address and contact information in the page, and help you transfer it to an addressbook or phone more easily

Less than four hours after seeing a mailing-list repost of that announcement, by Google‘s Kevin Marks (one of the two signatories of the initial announcement), I replied, pointing out that the implementation was badly broken, and that none of the microformats in a search for a single entity, in this case a school, were valid. (As is usual on Google’s own blogs, there was no facility for comments on the original announcements.)

Google‘s Gregor J. Rothfuss, the announcement’s other signatory, replied that he would look into the matter.

Almost a month later, I asked Gregor if there had been any progress, and he said (I quote him in full):

i will work on it when i have some time.

so I took him at his terse word, and left him to it, with no further reminders. That’s the last I heard from anyone at Google on the issue.

Three years on, though the specific faults have changed, not one of the microformats in the Google Maps search linked above is valid (the mandatory “fn”, or “formatted name” property is missing; address components lack the mandatory child-properties) and I have been unable to find one that is, in other results. They are as useless to someone wanting to add the subject’s address to their address book today as they were on day one.

Update, 31 July 2011: Another year has passed, the microformats are still broken.

Hello world!

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I’m migrating to a WordPress.org installation. Please bear with me — and the crappy header graphic — while I fiddle under the bonnet.

The links that used to be on my home page are now on the new about page. I’ve migrated posts and comments from my old blog, Mabblog, and closed comments there. I’ll be using this site to blog from now on.

Recommendations for a better theme, useful plug-ins and the like all welcome. I’d particularly like to be able to write my own HTML header and footer (without using PHP), and to add & improve metadata headers.

Overdue measurement microformat: useful for radio station frequencies

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Three or four years ago, I and a few others did a lot of work preparing a draft for a , hMeasure, for marking up length, mass (weight), temperature and so on. Sadly, it has yet to be taken up by the unelected and unaccountable clique who oversee the microformats “process” — but that’s a story for another time.

Recently Corey Mwamba asked how he could semantically mark up the frequencies of radio stations, for example:

Heart FM (Sussex) 102.4 MHz (Eastbourne)

My friend Toby Inkster rightly proposed the use of the “note” property, but I think that authors could also usefully use a non-microformat class name of “frequency”, for added semantic richness (and to aid screen-scrapers), and better still, the proposed hMeasure:

         <div class="vcard">
                 <b class="fn org">Heart FM
                    (<span class="adr">
                        <span class="locality">Sussex</span>
                     </span>)
                 </b>
                 <i class="note frequency">
                         <span class="hmeasure">
                          <span class="num">102.4</span>
                          <span class="unit">MHz</span>
                        </span>
                         (<abbr title="50.9761;0.2293" class="geo">
                              Eastbourne
                          </abbr>)
                 </i>
         </div>

If enough people use this pattern (and write up their experiences of doing so), then a de facto microformat will emerge.

Update: There’s a copy of that code at pastebin.com/CXCYT5nF which has syntax highlighting, and which you can replicate and edit if you wish to make a counter suggestion.

Update 2: I have now implemented this in the Wikipedia Frequency template, as seen, for example, on the article about BRMB.

The Highway Code should be available as a set of linkable HTML documents, not just PDFs

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The Highway Code is:

the official road user guide for Great Britain ()

Drivers must study it in order to pass a driving test, and all road users should remain familiar with it — including any revisions — throughout their lives.

It’s available online, but large parts only as a series of large PDF files. That means that when, for example, my friend Pete Ashton asks:

It’s still illegal to park on double yellow lines, right? on Twitter

I can’t easily answer him by linking directly to the section of the Road Markings PDF which says:

Double yellow lines mean no waiting at any time, unless there are signs that specifically indicate seasonal restrictions.

I would like the Highway Code to be fully available as a series of plain old semantic HTML web pages, with each section within each page having a unique ID (which even the parts already in HTML currently lack), so that I can link to the relevant, specific, section when I want to refer to it. For example, the section quoted above might be at http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/Highwaycode/markings#double-yellow

Dear Government, Can you do that, please?

Update: I’ve asked my MP, Khalid Mahmood, to do what he can to assist with this request. I’ll let you know what happens.

Ian Emes’ ‘French Windows’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘One of These Days’ at Ikon

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This evening, I went to the opening of a new exhibition at Birmingham’s Ikon gallery, ““.

The exhibition celebrates Ikon’s artistic programme from 1970 to 1978, and I particularly enjoyed Peter Sedgley‘s hypnotic Corona and David Hepher‘s No. 21.

David Hepher's 'No 21', painted in 1973, and Becky, who wasn't even born then.

But for me, as a Pink Floyd biographer, the highlight was undoubtedly the chance to see not only Ian Emes’ 1972 animation for the band’s One of These Days, projected onto the wall of a room the size of my living room (and in better quality than the YouTube version below), but also several cells from the animation, allowing close inspection. The film is accompanied by Pink Floyd‘s music (or is that vice versa?); sadly the sound system isn’t up to the job.

I had been told that my new book, Pink Floyd: The Music and The Mystery , would be on sale, but apparently there was a supply issue. Maybe soon?

Ian Emes will be giving a free talk on 18 August (booking essential); the exhibition itself runs until 5 September 2010.

Update: Spelling corrected; it’s “Emes” not “Eames”. Thanks to of Ikon for pointing that out. Sorry, Ian!

Update 2: I wrote a Wikipedia article about Emes.

Location: 52.477597, -1.912346

Guardian asks National Secular Society to comment on the ordination of women priests

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Much as I support the National Secular Society, asking them to comment on the ordination of women priests is like asking me to advise on the best kind of vaulting-pole.