Web 2 Ireland

Eircom has launched a new online music store which impresses with its mix of local/global and combination of unique and aggregated content.

As the incumbent telco and by far the biggest ISP, the Eircom.net site has always been well trafficked but has never impressed. However the latest owners are showing an entirely different and very refreshing attitude which is reflected perfectly in this totally revamped music site.

They could easily have taken some off-the-shelf white-label globo-solution to building an Irish online music store. Instead they have synthesised a unique Irish offering which I expect to do extremely well. The core features are all there with song and album downloads, streaming, charts, reviews, news, events, RSS feeds and videos but the execution is particularly good.

Their willingness to work with local operations like Entertainment.ie and start-ups like DownloadMusic.ie rather than trying to out-muscle them should be applauded and I've love to see it replicated across all the Eircom properties. Leopards really can change their spots!

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Comment posted by pete
at 11/3/2007 11:01:14 AM

Orange..boringand full of ads does it get that much traffic anyhow?

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 11/2/2007 3:24:36 AM

Should work just fine on my Nokia then

Comment posted by Storagezilla
at 11/1/2007 8:52:31 PM

Ugh! They're a Plays For Sure store which means you're out of luck if you're using an iPod or a Zune.

SanDisk Sansa it is then.. -puke-

Ticketmaster is the 800-lb middle-gorilla hated by both purchasers and vendors alike. Ticketsolve offers an alternative simple value proposition for small to mid-sized venues and events.

The litany of horror stories about Ticketmaster by ticket purchasers continues unabated. From the inflated charges, problematic site and incorrect billing, it survives due to a semi-monopoly in most countries. However it has problems in equal measure with those who need to get their tickets sold too. This is now being reflected in dropping business with IAC's poor results in July blamed squarely on the Ticketmaster division.

Rather than tackling them head-on, most competitors are going after the areas where Ticketmaster is weak such as the secondary market (StubHub, Seatwave). Ticketsolve, as a small start-up, appears to be aiming for smaller local customers and building from that. They to make the entire process of ticket sales simpler for vendors, with an upfront clear pricing model and without the common exclusivity deals forced by Ticketmaster.

There are a few clear benefits to the site. No set-up fees, flat rate per ticket so it scales with you and, most importantly, the purchase happens on your own site because Ticketsolve integrates into existing sites. Even if the costs were no lower than the competition, this integration must be compelling to anyone looking for further upsell opportunities on their own site. They claim that using their system leads to 34% online sales increase and 28% lower costs. I'd be interested to see what these are compared against.

There are three obvious markets for this service: disgruntled customers of other ticketing systems, small venues who want something that scales with them and venues that have yet to implement online ticketing. A small cinema local to me has completely removed all electronic ticketing presumably for cost reason and perhaps something like TicketSolve would bring them back into the game.

Since there is a plethora of venues and events in Ireland every day, there is an immediate local market for this service. The case studies they highlight include The Dublin International Film Festival, The Mermaid Arts Centre and The Dundalk Ice Dome. I walked through the purchase flow for tickets on the Ice Dome and it was as seamless as Ticketsolve claims. They can easily grow this business organically on a country by country basis.

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Comment posted by Carley
at 11/2/2007 6:24:15 PM

I work for a company in the United States that has been around for about seven years, called Brown Paper Tickets. It sounds like Ticketsolves' operating philosophy is much like ours. Viva la revolucion! Momentum is building around the globe! I'm excited to see where all this goes..

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 11/1/2007 10:21:32 AM

Great point about listings and pollution Sean.

I'm looking forward to your future announcements!

Comment posted by Sean Hanly
at 11/1/2007 8:30:45 AM

Great to see an overall positive response.

To pick up on some of the points mentioned:

- TM (in the guise most of us know them anyways) is not the big player in the end of the market we are playing in – mid to end of the tail to use long tail metaphor. The venues and festivals do not tend to use TM and TM does not provide them with the demand that they would for example drive towards higher end concerts.

- Most of the impetus for sale for our clients are there own marketing initiatives whether it be newspaper, direct, etc. Very rarely is it a browsing situation.

- The listings is something we may to look at in the future. However this space has been 'polluted' by existing providers who tend:
– take ownership of data and relationship through some type of membership scheme
– excessive charges justified by referrals that often times are not true referrals.
– we as a policy do not take any ownership of the client data or interfere in the relationship because of this.

- On the entertainment.ie style partnership all I would say is watch this space.

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 11/1/2007 5:57:18 AM

I didn't actually realise that IAC would be doing their Q3 results yesterday!

The story on Ticketmaster was margin still declining due to operating cost increases but operating income up 9%. Expecting flat or up slightly in Q4?.

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 11/1/2007 4:42:41 AM

I'd love to see an analysis of point-of-origin for ticket sales for different event types. i.e. where did the impetus for the sale come from: newspaper ad, billboard, word of mouth, the event/venue site itself or from Ticketmaster direct.

For all those events and venues where you already know what you want, Ticketmaster has no advantage. For times where you are looking for something to attend and just want to browse, obviously they have the upper hand.

One thing Ticketsolve could do there is have a portal site with listings only (or partner with equivalent of Entertainment.ie) that then re-direct people to the event/venue sites themselves.

Comment posted by Alan O’Rourke
at 11/1/2007 4:28:36 AM

A note to the guys if they are reading this, my wife is a county arts officer and programmes events year round. This would be ideal for her and all the other arts offices around the country. Might be worth giving them a shout.

Comment posted by Alan O’Rourke
at 11/1/2007 4:21:47 AM

Its a great idea and i hope it works. Back when running events for the Designers Guild we went with a similar start-up (less web, more phone and email) in Dublin and found the service great and costs a fraction of ticketmaster. The problems they had was in building enough momentum against the monster Ticketmaster. It was catch 22 for venues. While very expensive ticketmaster had the audience so venues were afraid of low attendance if they didnt go with them, even if they earned less money. I don't believe the start-up survived.

I'm getting a bit sick of mashups like find the nearest Twitter users in a Starbucks with free wifi using Google Maps with the map centred firmly on downtown San Francisco. Guess what? We have one Starbucks in Munster, the wifi ain't free and Google Maps in rural Ireland is rubbish.

But that doesn't mean I'm not excited by the arrival of Mashup Camp in Dublin because I see the opportunity for something very different to happen here. I'd like to see the bulk of the APIs and applications being discussed, used and mashed up to be of European origin. Is this feasible? Of the top of my head I came up with the following:

• Jaiku API
• RSS/ATOM from a thousand sources
• Multimap API
• Pixenate API
• Does Nooked FeedCommerce have an API yet?
• Xing API open yet?
• Does Segala have a Content Label API?
• Skype API
• SemWeb and Microformats experts like Danny Ayers, Brian Suda and Tom Morris are all based in Europe – Something with GRDDL?

There must be many more, let's hear about them!

Just in case you think this will just be a talk-shop, I asked David Berlind for some examples of outputs from previous camps. He pointed me to the impressive ChimeTV which uses a mashup approach to tune in to channels that in-turn aggregate video from across multiple sources. He also mentioned FutureBOSTON which prototyped some ideas for what the urban planning tools of tomorrow might look like. He has a video of a very neat Salesforce mashup from a previous camp here.

The only way you are going to learn about all of these is to attend. Mashup University is happening Nov 10-11 and Mashup Camp is Nov 11-12, both in the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. You need to register to attend. See you there!

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Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/31/2007 3:48:01 AM

John Musser over at Programmable Web has a list of 28 Euro-APIs.

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/31/2007 1:59:19 AM

And like a fool, I left out Swarmteams despite only writing about them recently and Ken mentioning their API.

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/29/2007 5:37:38 AM

Courtesy of Programmable Web :

ViaMichelin

and

Superbreak

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/28/2007 1:52:26 PM

And another:

Mapsolute

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/28/2007 7:33:34 AM

Two more obvious ones that I forgot are:

BBC Backstage

Last.fm Audioscrobbler

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/28/2007 5:43:33 AM

Thanks Walter.

Sorry for the delay Ed, you got stuck in spam queue (usual 2 URL limit in wordpress comments struck again)

Just thought of DERI guys and SIOC. Wonder if any mashups possible there?

Comment posted by Walter
at 10/28/2007 5:09:06 AM

There's more pixenate documentation at the above link. If anyone wants to use the API and is having problems, fire an email to walter@sxoop.com

Comment posted by Mashup Camp Blog Blog Archive Dublin camper Conor O’Neill challenges fellow campers to think differently
at 10/27/2007 9:40:14 PM

[] Mashup Camper is apparently looking for a mashup of a different sort at Mashup Camp. Wrote Conor earlier today: I'm getting a bit sick of mashups like find the nearest Twitter users in a []

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/27/2007 12:58:46 PM

Absolutely. Post links to the docs here!

Comment posted by PaulSweeney
at 10/27/2007 11:52:58 AM

Hi Conor. VoiceSage have an API that allows you to mash up outbound sms, voice, and premium sms. That's got to be interesting right?

The lovely people at CMP have made a few more tickets available to me for European bloggers who wish to attend the full Web2Expo Conference. This looks like an amazing few days from November 5th to 8th with a multi-stream conference, great keynote speakers, workshops and an expo. Not only that but our own Nicole Simon of blognation Germany is running Web2Open which is the unconference part of the week.

How do you get your hands on a pair of these tickets? Simply write a blog post (in English) linking over to this one explaining why you should get the tickets and which parts of the conference are most interesting to you. We'll pick our favourite post and hand over the access codes.

You must be willing to attend the conference and obviously you'll have to cover the cost of your own travel and accommodation.

As the conference is coming up very soon, the closing date is tomorrow (Saturday) midnight BST.

UPDATE: We're delighted to reveal that the winner of the two tickets is Ute Moritz. Congratulations Ute, we hope you have an amazing few days at the event.

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Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/31/2007 1:56:57 AM

Two more tickets for you all!

First person to email me at conor DOT oneill AT blognation DOT com can have one.

The second one is on offer at the infamous Storagezilla blog.

Comment posted by Ute
at 10/30/2007 2:13:29 PM

@pierro . thank you ))

Comment posted by Pierro
at 10/29/2007 5:40:06 PM

Mhh;
Congrats to Ute from me too

Comment posted by Tobias
at 10/29/2007 2:43:33 PM

congrats to Ute. And I´m going to look for Tim´s autograph
Might see one or two of you guys there at the open events.

tobias

Comment posted by Ute
at 10/29/2007 2:09:34 PM

Yeahhhhhhhhh! Amazing!!!!!! Great!!!! Thank you so much )

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/29/2007 1:52:33 PM

Tobias, apologies for the delay in announcing.

We're delighted to reveal that the winner of the two tickets is Ute Moritz. Congratulations Ute, we hope you have an amazing few days at the event.

Comment posted by Tobias
at 10/29/2007 8:05:03 AM

Hi Guys,
when are you going to announce the winners?
Or do you just send out the voucher codes?

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/26/2007 1:30:31 PM

@Phil – not done for links, done to make it easy to find the entrants!

Comment posted by Tobias
at 10/26/2007 1:12:36 PM

just have a look: http://blog.nenntmichismael.de/index.php?/archives/48-Getting-to-Web2.0Expo.html

Comment posted by Phil v. Sassen
at 10/26/2007 11:25:52 AM

@Conor:

Be careful! Google might penalize your prize draws with a ranking penalty.

Over 150 people attended yesterday's Innovating the Business Model event at Stillorgan Park Hotel. Headlining the bill for day was Prof. Henry Chesbrough who is Executive Director of the Centre for Open Innovation at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Prof. Chessbrough's message revolves around the notion that the best innovation stems from the use by firms of external as well as internal ideas to create value and increase growth. From the classic Xerox example and the relatively recent iPod examples, he presented a compelling case.

Although he did not explicitly mention web2.0, the relevance was extremely obvious. A particular thought which occurred to me following his talk was whether Irish web2.0 companies could follow this thinking to its ultimate conclusion and collaborate on new services. The inconvenient reality of who would ultimately own, drive and manage such ventures is an obvious issue but maybe not impossible to figure out.

Other speaks on the day included:

- Sean Keenan of Galway based Multis who spoke about their use of innovative models of partnership
- Danny Gleeson of G&L Technology Ltd who spoke about the European Space Agency as a source of new licensing opportunities
- Dave Quane of Notel Ireland who gave an insight into Notel's restructuring in the face of changing market conditions
- Maria Weir & Jane Watters from Scotland's Intellectual Assets Centre who spoke about their experiences of working with Scottish SME's who hold intellectual assets at the core of their business models
- Alexander of Arvetica who presented a graphically based method of mapping business models.

The event was organised by my colleagues in the technology & automation division of Enterprise Ireland.

I'm one of the speakers at an upcoming event in Dublin which is concerned with maximising the marketing opportunities offered by social software and social networks.

The line-up right now is:

• Lionel Alexander, VP Hewlett Packard
• Micheál Martin TD, Minister of Enterprise, Trade and Employment
• Dr Breffni Tomlin, Academic Director of National Institute of Technology Management, UCD
• Open Forum with Aisling McCabe of RTE ePublishing, Richard Moyles of furniture.ie and myself

There are two keynote speakers; Regis McKenna is a Silicon Valley Marketing legend who has helped launch many of the seminal technology products of the past thirty years including those of Intel, Apple and Genentech; Micheal Platt is a Microsoft Architecture strategist and will talk about Enterprise 2.0

It's refreshing to see ICT Ireland, UCD and the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment involved and interested in this area. This is not your usual echo-chamber conference and I'll be particularly interested to get mainstream audience feedback during the open forum. I fully expect to hear plenty of confused or doubting voices.

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Regis McKenna is regarded as one of the great marketing thinkers. And…he’s coming to Dublin on 27th November to talk about how marketing as we know it is disappearing in what he calls a “total access world”. What does he regard as enabling this world…web2.0 technologies to a great extent.

Regis is joined by other speakers including Michael Platt of Microsoft who spoke at the O’Reilly Web2.0 event in San Francisco last April.

Please find link to the event here.

Eoghan McCabe launched FoldSpy back in July and they will soon measure their 20 millionth screen. The tool is designed to tell you what your visitors are seeing so you can optimise ad placements.

Web users spend far more time at the top of a page than at the bottom, so the top of the page is more valuable when placing ads or other page elements. Using FoldSpy, you can find out exact where this top is and you can make design adjustments accordingly.

I hadn't fully understood the tool until I tried it out. You add one line of code to your site's page headers to enable it. Then to see it in action, you simply go to www.yoursite.com/#foldspy. There you get an overlay on your site showing what percentage of measured users (on all sites) could see particular areas of your page. An area of 600 x 400 on one of my blogs shows 96% of viewers would see everything.

Increase that to 1024 x 600 and it plummets to 19%! You can then tweak ad placement to ensure that they are seen by as many users as possible. The important point is that they are not reporting screen resolution (which Google Analytics already reports) but the statistics on the sizes of the browser window. With the sites I run, over 70% of users are at 1024×768 resolution but they may have the browser window set much smaller.

There are several other very useful features including a hover-over mode where you can see the percentages changing as you move the mouse around. You can also change colour and position to suit sites with different layouts or dark colour schemes. Obviously each site that installs it provides more data for everyone else.

There are both Free and Pro versions of the site. With the Free version, the data you see comes from FoldSpy sites all over the world; with FoldSpy Pro, you also get direct access to data collected on your site, which means the results are tailored to your particular audience. They have focused on building up the screen measurement data since launch but expect to do a marketing push on the Pro version in mid November.

This is one of those well-designed useful utilities that every web developer should have in their arsenal. It has made me think twice about the screen expansion we were going to do on one of our sites.

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I only just heard of Belfast-based Swarmteams last week despite them getting quite a bit of coverage last autumn. Given the buzz around mobile social networks, it looks like they have a great growth opportunity on their hands.

It is based around the idea of group messaging using SMS, IM, RSS and E-mail with a particular focus on SMS and mobile. Like Jaiku channels you can message individual groups and not just everyone of your contacts (like Twitter does).

Rather than simple format-less messages, they have implemented an SMS command system too. For example, the prefix .CHAT means broadcast this message and send all replies to everyone in the swarm. By contrast, .ASK means broadcast but just send me the replies and .TELL means broadcast but don't send any replies. In fact there is a whole raft of commands which requires its own cheatsheet!

It is clear that Swarmteams was designed for mobile first and web second. This means that you can even do things like create swarms on the fly using your phone. I see huge potential here for co-ordinating short-term activities between constantly changing group and sub-groups of people.

A perfect example occurred this evening with the Facebook Debate in London. No back-channel had been created and someone already at the event wondered if one existed. With Swarmteams they could have created one on the spot using their phone and invited a bunch of people to it. Instant group SMS, IM and RSS for all to monitor or take part.

The site itself is very concept heavy with lots of info about swarm like behavior which I'm not sure any user really cares about. The web-based message board is quite sparse in design but has a large number of icons which may confuse. If Twitter is under-designed, then Swarmteams seems to be taking the kitchen sink approach to features. I even spotted a Skype logo. A strange omission is GTalk and Jabber for IM given that they support AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and MSN.

There are two versions available. One for Enterprises (Swarm-Pro) and one for individuals (Swarm-it). Whilst I originally didn't get the Enterprise angle, the examples they give make sense: Retail Industry engaging consumers, Music Industry engaging fans, Government & Campaigners engaging citizens etc.

The version for individuals is where I see the potential for rapid growth but since it is a pay-for service I fear it will remain untapped. Both Twitter and Jaiku bit the bullet on SMS cost in order to build their customer bases. Both intend(ed) to offer freemium services in the future. Could Swarmteams use the Enterprise income to subsidise the Consumer version in order to quickly build the user-base?

As users become more sophisticated they are moving from the simple functionality of Twitter to the richer experience of Jaiku. I really think that Swarmteams could be the next logical step.

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Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/18/2007 4:21:44 AM

Thanks for the update Ken.

I'd be very surprised if you are not already beating VCs off with a stick. Any Euro-VC who has seen the excitment in this area must see the value Swarmteams has.

I love the concept-heaviness on your blog, I subscribed the second I found it but I just thought it might distract on the main site. Do you speak much at conferences? If not, you should!

If all those commands are available via HTTP post then you are way ahead of anyone else in API richness.

I'm going to check out the widget, that sounds very useful. Might be perfect for the Paddy's Valley site in fact!

Comment posted by ken thompson
at 10/18/2007 3:04:23 AM

Conor

Thanks for taking the time to put together a very insightful review

We are currently growing swarmteams organically using the enterprise version of swarms with music bands, retail brands and civic/youth engagement fans mostly focused on the UK. These enterprises sponsor the messages provided they are on their chosen topics.

We are now starting to looking actively for external investment but we did not want to do this until we had some good revenue streams. External funding would enable us to offer the personal version for free if we want to – we are not yet fully decided on this one of things we have discovered is that sustainable long-term swarming works best in the context of real 'must do' applications as opposed to general gossip and they can be harder to find in the personal space.

I agree with your comments on 'concept heavy' – we will be slimming down and simplifying things over the coming weeks. I think this also points to one of our uniques we developed a novel biological model for communications (patent pending) and then built a system to implement the model. So it means we have intellectual property which you can't really create by rapid prototyping alone.

I know about the Paddys Valley trip etc timing just not right for us – would love to chat further with Niall. I wrote to Conor to try and make some connections with the Irish Web2.0 community which I heard about from Brian Cleland at InterTrade. We are looking for potential resellers and partners in both geographies and sectors.

In terms of the API any swarm command you can issue from the handset can be issued by another program via an HTTP post.

We also have a 'Swarm Button' widget which can be dropped onto an existing website or community or to add mobile and IM channels to it instantly. It also provides single signon if you are logged into the application you don't have to log-in again to swarmteams. All the application has to do is change the code where it communicates with it groups to a call to the Swarm API and it can use TELL, ASK or CHAT and swarmteams will handle all the channels for it automatically.

Best Regards

Ken Thompson

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/17/2007 4:54:16 PM

The depth of their thinking and analysis of social behaviour is easily the match of anything you hear from the Jaiku guys.

They got in touch with Web2Ireland via InterTradeIreland. I wouldn't be surprised if Paddy's Valley came up too.

Perhaps they fell off your radar due to the pay-for aspect? I have to wonder if maybe they could have grown as fast as Jaiku over the past year with a freemium approach?

I'll be interested to see what they are doing with APIs too.

Comment posted by Niall Larkin
at 10/17/2007 3:56:25 PM

Excellent analysis Conor. I had forgotten about Swarmteams. Strangely enough for an Irish outfit, I first heard of them through Techcrunch. It'll be no surprise to those that know me that I was drawn to their application of the principles of bio-logic (rather than techo-logic) to smoothing out normal socio-logical processes.

I looked into the guy behind it and I remember thinking what an interesting character with refreshing outlook on selecting people and building teams. (Almost an in-company BarCamp ethos)

I'm curious as to how they came under your radar lately? Would love to hear more from them. I mean this is a company that would presumably have get a great deal from FOWA, BarCamps (incl Belfast) and of course the upcoming trip to Silicon Valley.

In a recent competition for the best idea for a webapp with an Irish focus, I was surprised to find several submissions were about citizen interaction with the public service and the Government. This set me thinking that we should not encourage the public service to build applications and sites but to build APIs for our data.

The key word is “our”. There is still a strong belief in the public service that somehow they own our data whether that is a hospital telling me I can only get my son’s x-rays through the Freedom of Information act, the Ordnance Survey keeping an iron-grip on GIS data or local government publishing data in proprietary Word docs and PDFs.

One developer who will soon be releasing a much needed webapp which queries particular data across many County Councils told me that he has had to build multiple converters and scrapers for this data. Given that the LGCSB (Local Government Computer Services Board) should be in charge of all of this, how did we end up in this situation?

Expecting the public service to build webapps for us is a fool’s errand. They would spend €100m, take five years and it wouldn’t work when it was finished. However, if they make each department’s data available along with some simple APIs, then citizens can do it for themselves, or pay someone to do it. Free unlimited access to all APIs for individual or non-commercial use and some small pay-as-you-go for commercial use. I’m sure Yahoo can give plenty of guidance here.

So what data do we want and need? Anything available under Freedom of Information from crime rates per county to court cases to tax revenue by category. If it exists, we want it. Private data like tax is clearly out of bounds but the Revenue could make statistics available and allow us to do our own slicing and dicing. Maybe we wouldn’t need the ESRI reports any more, we could build our own.

Am I living in a fantasy land or does anyone think this can happen? Revenue Online proves that the capability to build smart, useful, reliable applications exists in some parts of the Irish Civil Service. Perhaps if those guys released an API, the others might follow?

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Comment posted by Damien
at 10/18/2007 3:39:08 AM

The Guardian have a long running campaign in the UK to open access to public data. The premise is that you’ve already paid for it once with your taxes, you shouldnt have to pay for it again.

A good starting point in ireland would be the CSO – they don’t have an API, but at least seem open to sharing census and other stats we paid them to collect – see http://www.cso.ie/px/ and also have some RSS feeds

I think nooked.com (in Sligo) have also been RSS feed enabling public bodies, though usually to suck in data, not pump it out..

Damien

Comment posted by DennisDeery.com
at 10/17/2007 7:47:04 PM

["¦] blognation Ireland Blog Archive Time for api.gov.ie? Irish blogger Conor O’Neill offers a great idea – why don’t governments provide an open application-programming interface to their mounds of data? How about it U.S.A.? (tags: government) ["¦]

Comment posted by John Ward
at 10/17/2007 2:45:27 PM

It is ESB etc”¦ however it could’ve served as a backend data service.

I would doubt there are any skunkworks, my experience of the public sector is that everything has to documented before being done. Another aspect is that security, and data privacy is often the most important requirement above all else which could hamper anything like this. It would have to go through all sorts of compliance reviews. It’s unfortunate but its the reality.

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/17/2007 8:36:55 AM

Thanks for that link John, I wasn’t aware of Reach until this morning. I’ve just checked the site and it fit my prediction perfectly: it tried to install MSXML 5.0 and failed in Internet Explorer 7. Nuff said really.

But this is pure Enterprise level stuff anyway. I’m sure it is ESBed and WS-*’ed up the wazoo it but doesn’t enable citizens or average developers to do things for themselves.

Has anything skunkworks ever come out of the public service? A few techie civil servants with spare time on their hands and some public data that is really hard to get at”¦”¦”¦”¦.

Comment posted by hugh
at 10/16/2007 9:58:42 PM

data liberators of the world, unite!

Comment posted by datalibre.ca * when irish api’s are smilin’
at 10/16/2007 9:57:34 PM

["¦] ie.blognation.com: In a recent competition for the best idea for a webapp with an Irish focus, I was surprised to ["¦]

Comment posted by John Ward
at 10/16/2007 3:30:49 PM

Conor,
There is an initiative to do this. It is called Reach Public Services Broker and it was a project I worked on. The concept was simple: a single place to engage with the public sector, data from each of the agencies would be made available via a message broker – Address from welfare, Passport id from foreign affairs, License id from Environment. Unfortunately it hasn’t delivered on the vision, and I fear may never do.

http://www.reachservices.ie/

http://www.reach.ie

In terms of thought leadership it was way ahead of its time. The reality of delivery was somewhat different. Each agency has its own IT program they’re working on, with budgets tied to that. Second, the government requires outside expertise and expensive consultants to advise them, a second bunch to build it. This becomes expensive and can cause problems.

John

Comment posted by Steven Livingstone
at 10/16/2007 2:56:52 PM

James, if someone wrote an API – even if behind the scences it scraped stuff – consumers would write their clients against it and when the “real” API’s became available that would not change. You would be the API

Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/16/2007 2:18:36 PM

I wouldn’t mind so much if Ordnance Survey would actually launch the great new features they announced aeons ago. If they would also do a deal with Google so that we get non-joke rural GoogMaps, then we could use Google APIs!

A simple start for all the others would be RSS feeds for every category of guide, form and press release published by each department. Then let the geek citizens build the portals for the average joe in the street.

Comment posted by James Corbett
at 10/16/2007 1:46:59 PM

I think it’s a great idea, whatever about the practicalities. The Ordinance Survey situation galled me so much a few years ago, when I bought my first GPS device, that I setup a Yahoo Group called OpenEir to see if we could build an “open source map” of Ireland. There was quite a bit of interest but it never took off.

On a separate note I trawled through all the government department websites lately in search of RSS feeds and found that only 5 departments – (1)Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, (2) Enterprise, Trade and Employment, (3) Environment, Heritage and Local Government, (4) Health and Children, and (5) Social and Family Affairs, provided feed for their press sections. The department of Health and Children stands out for offering 6 separate feeds. Ironic that it’s not Comms, Energy and Natural Resources, eh!

I was actually thinking of building scrapers for each of the other departments but feck it”¦ why should I even have to consider that. This isn’t even APIs we’re taking about, just drop dead simple RSS feeds