Text added to digital economy bill that could block sites such as YouTube echoes almost word for word a suggestion from the BPI

A controversial amendment to the digital economy bill that could block sites such as YouTube is copied almost word-for-word from a draft written by the BPI, which lobbies on behalf of the British music industry.

The BPI confirmed on Thursday that it drafted a letter which was circulated to government and opposition peers containing a suggested draft amendment to the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patent Act. Earlier this month the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Clement-Jones added the text into the digital economy bill almost exactly as provided as part of amendment 120a.

However, the suggested changes – which won approval from peers and will now be considered by the House of Commons – have come under fire from the heads of the four biggest internet service providers in the UK, as well as the UK chiefs of companies including Google, eBay and Yahoo, who said yesterday that they threatened freedom of speech and could lead to British websites being blocked without due judicial process.

In response, the BPI said that the amendment a "clear and sensible" way to deal with illegal downloading – but not that it had been the source of the draft version.

Today a spokesman for the BPI insisted that the organisation was not embarrassed at the disclosure of the source of the amendment.

"This was a suggestion that we made to the government in 2009, with this wording. This version of the proposal was sent to the government and also to the opposition parties. The government decided it wanted to go a different way. The opposition parties, while not fully agreeing with it, saw it as a good framework for what they wanted to put down," the spokesman said. "We have consistently said that the digital economy bill should have sensible measures to deal with peer-to-peer file sharing."

The BPI's proposed amendment, in a letter dated 8 January, is almost identical to the version put forward by Lord Clement-Jones on 3 March. The key difference is the addition in Clement-Jones's version of questions about national security, and of tests to see whether the blocking of a site infringes human rights and freedom of speech, and whether an ISP has tried to "facilitate legal access to content".

Jim Killock, head of the Open Rights Group, a pressure group on digital rights which opposes the amendment, said that it was understandable that a lobby group such as the BPI would try to draft legislation – but that the Lords were at fault for not querying the source and intention of the amendment more closely.

"The BPI has got every right to do this," said Killock. "The question is why the politicians have said in such a complicated arena that they will take the BPI's ideas wholesale without consulting anybody else."

Killock said that ORG, Consumer Focus and Liberty had all provided draft legislation and notes to politicians for the bill - but that theirs took the form of "probing amendments", whose purpose was to show weaknesses in the draft bill which could then be revised.

"It's the politicians who have been irresponsible here. It shows that they're taking the BPI far too seriously," Killock said.

The BPI spokesman responded: " We made a proposal on this – and as is quite common – used statutory language to convey our point. This is something that all sides in the digital economy debate do." He defended the addition of the amendment to the draft bill: "[the peers] made changes to our proposal which was then tabled by them, debated fully in the House of Lords, before being agreed and made part of the bill."

So today the good people of Birmingham learned two thing. Firstly, we’re getting a shiny new train station next to the venerable Moor St and incorporating (in name at least) the geriatric Curzon St to serve the high speed rail link to London. This was announced with no warning by a visit to the city by the Prime Minister accompanied by a torrent of detailed plans indicating this is actually going to happen.

Here’s part of the plans showing the station and platforms between Moor St and Curzon St (taken from this PDF which is from this page).

Secondly we learned that the Big City Plan and the consultation surrounding it isn’t worth the price of Mike Whitby’s absurd tie. All it takes is a well considered national strategy to fall into place and a decade or more of “planning” for the area can be torn up and forgotten about.

I’m actually fairly upbeat about this turn of events. I think the station is a good idea and the location a fine one. The only casualty I can see is the new Birmingham City University campus but that doesn’t worry me. The city has been suffering from BCU-creep for a while now and putting the brakes on that will be a relief. (I’ll just let the phrase “BCU-creep” just sit there without explanation so you might speculate as to what I mean.)

Now, rather than an inward looking university campus (that’s not a dig – all university campuses are inherently inward looking in my experience and so they should be) we get a transport hub. Certainly the main purpose of the station will be relatively expensive trains for the relative few but the halo effect of this should be dramatic, both for the local transport infrastructure and the Digbeth / Eastside area. Because now Digbeth will have a purpose – serving the station.

For a year or so I lived behind Waterloo station in London. That bit of Southwark is quite a bit like Digbeth – off the beaten track, full of railway arches and industrial pockets, yet right in the middle of the city. It was a good place to live because it was 10 minutes walk from the South Bank yet reasonably quiet for such a central location. And while it didn’t have every amenity most of what you needed was provided by the shops, cafes and miscellany that fed off the periphery of Waterloo.

I wouldn’t want to say Digbeth will evolve in the same way but I think a massive train station (especially when considered in aggregate with New St, Moor St and the nearby coach station) will give the area a genuine reason to develop and change rather than a spurious regeneration agenda, one which has demonstrably shown itself to be fragile when the financial climate changes. (What exactly is happening to the stretch of land cornered by Rea and Bradford Streets? If the answer is nothing can we have it back?)

Birmingham as a city has been far too overplanned. It suffered this in the 60s and, despite cries to the contrary, the Big City Plan was to be a corrective measure using exactly the same tactics. Big plan, big vision, big big big. And yet I have an inkling this sort of approach is doomed, or at least flawed. I keep thinking of desire paths – the gradually eroded paths that indicate where people want to walk as opposed to where the planners expect them to walk.

Just for fun, here’s my desire path from Fazeley St to Moor St Station involving a patch of wasteland and a car park. If you ever need to make that journey consider this my gift to you:

I’m also reminded of Peter Ackroyd talking about how London is inherently unplannable. My memory is hazy and probably inaccurate but here’s something I found from 2006 outlining his fatalistic approach to cities:

“Power and money are what have made it both ugly and voraciously successful,” insists Ackroyd. “It’s a largely unplanned city, with buildings that come and go. Little or nothing stays still in London. The drive for money makes it a restless creature, forever biting off its own limbs and watching them grow back in new, bigger and shinier forms.”

As, for example, in the case of the cluster of new skyscrapers planned for the City of London. Ackroyd will not be drawn on the merits of their designs; he simply underlines the point that London has an organic character. It has always changed and always will. “If it stops changing, it will die. It’s a monster, yet I accept it all. No part of London is alien to me. I love walking it at random every day, after writing, and watching the changes take place before my eyes. But, as to whether change, architectural or otherwise, makes it a better or worse place than it was – how can any of us really know?”

London is a clusterfuck of a city, and yet it’s quite successful at what it does, be it finance, culture or whathaveyou. Partly this is due to its elephantine size but I suspect it’s got a lot to do with it’s flexibility.

One of the exciting things about Birmingham for me is the relative freedom it offers you to just get on and do stuff. There’s very little power here and the leaders tend to follow rather than lead. While Birmingham has a lot of pride it doesn’t manifest itself in the aggressive, defensive posturing of Manchester. Rather it’s a welcoming, appreciative pride. When I do stuff in Birmingham people don’t ask me why or question whether it fits into the Birmingham way – they just take it, or leave it. Sometimes they say thanks. Sometimes they say “it’s about time someone did this” so I tell them it wasn’t that hard really.

(Sidebar – I remember Noel Dunne talking about moving here decades ago. He memorably said it takes three generations before Manchester will accept you as a Manc but you’ll be a Brummie in three months. True that.)

The thing is, I see the obsession with city planning as a threat to this. I suspect the reason Brummies have, in recent history, been a little reticent to get on and do stuff is the top-down infrastructure of the city hasn’t encouraged it. From the physical stranglehold of the road network to the intellectual void of the council chamber the Brummies have been held back by a sense that it’s not worth the effort. And with the Big City Plan we were faced with another monolithic attempt to get the city “right”, an endeavour that is surely missing the point. Cities aren’t got right. They evolve based on the needs, wants and desires of the people who make them. The thing is, no-one knows what those needs, wants and desires are until they have something to bounce off. You certainly can’t plan for them with high-falutin concepts.

I’m being a bit knee-jerk in my ranting here. I know that some planning is essential and I know I don’t have the language to explain exactly what I mean (hence the knee-jerk) but I think that planning needs to be adaptive. Have a look at what we’ve got, see what people are doing around it and encourage that. Don’t demolish a much loved cafe because it doesn’t fit the big plan – build the plan around the cafe. Rather than give a hugh trance of land to a university or shopping centre or Bennie Grey (god love him) divvy it up into small plots and create a bit of competition between the landlords. A hive of Bennie’s.

Cities are chaotic and vibrant and alive. They cannot and should not be controlled. Certainly they should be safe, well lit and well connected but you can’t plan for what they’ll be used for. What you can do is drop in some nice big coral reefs and see what sort of fishes start gathering around them. Then you feed the fishes.

I think our new station, a structure that has a use and a purpose, could be that reef. It’d certainly be more of a stimulus than Millennium Point, a structure as effective as a breezeblock in an aquarium.

And on that note, I’ll stop.

This weekend, LibDem members who attend the national convention in Birmingham will have the chance to vote on an emergency measure affirming the party's commitment to an open and just Internet, repudiating this disastrous measure. If you (or someone you know) is attending the convention, please support the "Save the Net" emergency measure and help rehabilitate the party's reputation on fundamental freedoms in the information society.

Parliamentarians need to recognize that copyright touches everyone and every technology in the digital age. It is no longer a question of inter-business regulation and deals. Getting copyright wrong has the potential to mess up our freedom of speech, prevent us from getting the benefits of new technologies, and damage society in other very profound ways.

It is therefore deeply inappropriate for such fundamental proposals to have been introduced by both the government or the opposition parties at the behest of one side of the debate. That applies just as much to disconnection, which Mandelson introduced in the summer at the last minute under pressure again from the BPI and other rights holders.

Image by Daniel Battams via battams.wordpress.com

A little under a month of gushing into my new iPhone (I was finally able to upgrade for free on Orange), I've put the toys away, calmed down and started integrating it properly into my work and personal life. As a thinly veiled excuse then to wax on about the (definitive?) smartphone, I thought I'd share my tips on some apps that help me in my third sector comms role. I would love if you would share yours with me in the comments.

Instapaper

This is simply a fantastic on-the-move app for catching up on all the blogs, articles, news items (whatever) that you rarely get round to reading but you know would help build your knowledge in the day job. I trialled the free version for a week, but decided to upgrade to the full deal for £2.99 and don't regret it. Download the app and set up a free Instapaper account online to sync it to. Drag the web version bookmarklet to your browser's bar on your work pc / laptop, and next time you stumble upon an interesting article - hit the button, and it magically transfers to your iPhone. You can then read the article at your leisure and offline! Catch-up on a week's worth of blogs while you're on the tube, stuck in a lift, waiting in a queue, or erm in the loo. The paid-for version includes pagination (ooh fancy) and allows you to add whole blog feeds (a bit like a lite version of GoogleReader). So you need never miss the latest AskCharity blog post again ;). Love this app.

Pocket Informant (PI) Lite

I'm still using the free version of this, but am contemplating upgrading to the (admittedly pricey) £4.99 version. For ages I have found it annoying that at work I have to use an Outlook Calendar for my meetings and notes, which I *could* access from home if I logged into the system - but decided to sync with my Google Calendar instead. So I could then check from my phone or laptop whether I had any meetings or lunch appointments the next day. However, this flexible, intuitive, and nice-looking calendar and notes app allows you to sync it with your Google Calendar. So, all I now have to do is click the PI Lite on my iPhone and I get to see my work calendar immediately (through a multiple syncing process but once in place you don't notice). As free apps go it works and looks great. It two-way syncs when you open it; so a meeting I add in when I'm out and out-and-about on my phone appears in Outlook when I'm sat at my desk hours later. Always know what your schedule is - and never double-book an appointment again.

Tweetie2

Again, I had been using free Twitter clients like Echofon and Twitterific, but decided to pay £1.79 for this premium app. So far, I'm loving this too. Tweetie2 allows me to tweet, retweet, DM, favourite, see my followers, search, and so on - as well as access all my Twitter Lists (valuable sounding boards, charities, journalist contacts) and also add and create more Lists. I can also edit my profile and bio on the move should I wish to. What really excites me though is the Instapaper add-on. When someone tweets a url, and I don't have time to access it - or am about to lose signal - I hit 'read later' and whoosh: the url link itself gets sent to my Instapaper account. I can then open it up and read in my own time, and offline. So useful! I can also add photos and video to tweets (and choose my service - e.g. Twitpic, Posterous, and more) - and this app screen-rotates so I can type using the keyboard in landscape mode. I like a lot.

Audioboo

You don't need an online account to use this great, free, DIY podcasting service - but if you do, it syncs all of the audioboos you follow to your handset app. Where the app comes into its own is obviously the instantaneous record and upload function - where you can broadcast to the world your intelligent "citizen journalism" (or just tell everyone what you're making for tea). This has great potential for third sector organisations; report live from an event or campaign, interview a service user or fundraiser. I plan to record a bunch of audioboos with the young people at Whizz-Kidz as well as combine it with live-tweeting pics and video from (for example) the London Marathon in April. What will you use it for?

Evernote

I've talked about Evernote elsewhere in this blog, and some of the ways I use it - which funnily enough have kind of been superseded by Instapaper a little bit now I have the iPhone. Evernote has a fine app - not amazing (how about a premium version, guys, where you can separate multiple folders like the web version?) but pretty good. Access all of your notes, snap something when you're out and upload very easily via the app. Edit, rename, label, and favourite - all from the app. But it still helps to have the web version to 'sort'.

Google Buzz

Not strictly an app I know - but you can create a shortcut icon to your iPhone desktop by hitting "add to homepage". There's been a lot of erm buzz about Buzz. Personally, I like it - but only really out of curiosity for reading 'nearby buzz' when I'm moving around. I've got some nice local knowledge by listening in on what people are buzzing about within a five-mile radius; pub offers, restaurant reviews, and handy travel shortcuts. Just using Buzz to 'follow' people I find a little dull and intrusive - I'm happy using Twitter for this purpose for now. Logging into Gmail and seeing '73 Buzz notifications' just makes me groan.

Okay, I'm going to stop there as this post is getting a bit long, but I'd love to hear what you think about these and other apps. Here's a challenge: why don't you try using all of the platforms I've mentioned to run an online campaign (text, audio, video, photo and blogging) entirely for free and remotely? Now that's got me thinking...

Oh and I'm really sorry if this has bored everyone who doesn't have a smartphone or any of these apps. But you didn't have to read it did ya? ;)

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Social networking site fears reputation permanently damaged by false claim that it let older men pressure teenage girls for sex

Facebook has threatened to sue the Daily Mail for damages after the paper wrongly claimed in a piece published on Wednesday that 14-year-old girls who create a profile on the social networking site could be approached "within seconds" by older men who "wanted to perform a sex act" in front of them.

The paper apologised in print today and online yesterday for the error, which the author of the piece, Mark Williams-Thomas, insisted had been introduced by editors at the paper despite being told it was wrong. In fact, Williams-Thomas – a retired policeman who now works as a criminologist – had been using another, unspecified social network.

But the giant social networking site, which has 23 million users in the UK alone, said that although the Mail has changed the headline of the article online – so that it now reads "I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you" – it had not at first changed the page title of the article online, used by internet search engines to index content, nor the URL of the piece, which is also a factor in search-engine indexing.

At 10am today the title still read "I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you" while the URL contained the text "i-posed-girl-14-facebook-what-followed-sicken-you". The title and URL were, however, amended before noon.

A UK spokeswoman for Facebook said the company was still considering legal action and looking at the "brand damage that has been done".

Charles Garside, assistant editor of the Daily Mail, said that the apology had been produced in consultation with Facebook, and that representatives of the paper and Facebook would be meeting today. The changes to the URL and page title were "a technical matter", he said, adding: "We are removing elements of that".

The incorrect naming of Facebook is understood to be blamed on "a matter of miscommunication".

Facebook staff claimed that attempts to add a comment to the piece, as readers are able to do, were repeatedly blocked by the Daily Mail.

The company is concerned that the article may have done permanent harm to its reputation in the UK. "If you were a Middle England reader and your child was on Facebook, this sort of thing would have a very serious effect on what you thought of us," said the Facebook spokeswoman.

Tensions over Facebook's position in the UK as a popular site among people of all ages, allowing them to contact each other, have been magnified in the past week after Peter Chapman was convicted of murdering Ashleigh Hall, a 17-year-old girl who thought that Chapman, 33, was also a teenager. Chapman had got in touch with Hall via Facebook, leading to criticisms from some senior police officers over the measures that the site takes to protect susceptible individuals .

But the Daily Mail piece, which carried Williams-Thomas's byline, suggested that anyone who signed up as a 14-year-old girl would be approached "within minutes of the profile going up". The piece also said that "messages from men poured in" and that "the first three who approached me were aged between 20 and 40".

However, Williams-Thomas and his agent, Sylvia Tidy-Harris, both insisted on their Twitter feeds that he had not used Facebook for the Mail article.

It "was on another well-known SNS [social networking service], not Facebook", said Tidy-Harris, echoing Williams-Thomas.

Tidy-Harris said that yesterday had "Been a hellishly tough day trying to juggle @mwilliamsthomas misquote in daily mail along with meetings and literally 100ks of calls/emails".

At Facebook, the anger at the misrepresentation was magnified because, they say, they were initially unable to get any response from the paper to their appeals for corrections.

"The people at Facebook in the US were reading this and knew at once that it couldn't have been our platform," said the Facebook UK spokeswoman. "We have made Facebook much more favourable to the safety of minors – minors under 18 cannot receive messages from somebody over 18."

That means it would be impossible for the scenario described by Williams-Thomas to happen on Facebook.

Facebook's representatives said that they tried to get a response from the Mail throughout Wednesday without success, and that attempts by people at its PR agency to post comments on the piece with clarifying text failed. The Mail uses moderators who on that story approved comments before they could appear. By this morning the article had 380 comments.

Williams-Thomas has not responded to requests to specify which social networking service he was using by the time of publication.

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If there's one commitment in the Conservatives' Technology Manifesto, billed as 'the most ambitious technology agenda ever proposed by a British political party', which makes my heart leap with joy, it's this:

We will also create a small IT development team in government – a 'government skunkworks' – that can develop low cost IT applications in-house and advise on the procurement of large projects.

For those unfamiliar with the term, 'skunkworks' was devised by aircraft maker Lockheed Martin - and is still jealously guarded by them as a trademark. It describes a small, almost secret unit within a large organisation, protected from all the internal bureaucracy, and given carte blanche to be creative. Among Lockheed Martin's 14 rules for its operation are:

• Unit manager to be answerable directly to a very senior member of the organisation.
• An 'almost vicious' restriction of the numbers of people involved.
• Minimal reporting requirements.
• Strict access controls.
• Mutual trust, with close cooperation and daily liaison, allowing correspondence to be kept to a minimum.

All very 'web 2.0'... until you learn these rules came together in the 1940s.

I detect the influence of Tom Steinberg. Eighteen months ago, at MySociety's 5th birthday celebration, Tom gave a speech in which he said:

So long as the cult of outsourcing everything computer related continues to dominate in Whitehall, and so long as experts like Matthew [Somerville] and Francis [Irving] are treated as suspicious just because they understand computers, little is going to change.

Government in the UK once led the world in its own information systems, breaking Enigma, documenting an empire’s worth of trade. And then it fired everyone who could do those things, or employed them only via horribly expensive consultancies. It is time to start bringing them back into the corridors of power.

But equally, as I argued at the time, bringing those kinds of people back into Whitehall and then dumping them inside IT departments wasn't going to help either. This skunkworks concept - where you're effectively a startup within the organisation - should offer the best of both worlds.

I've been one of numerous people - inside and outside government - who have suggested such an approach in the past. And no matter how positive a hearing the idea received, it didn't happen. Its time may well be coming.

My suggestion is that this unit needs to be created very, very quickly after the election. I remember the uncertainty and sheer chaos which followed the handover from Tories to Labour in 1997. Radical, dramatic, shocking, good things happened. For a while, you went into work each day not knowing what was coming next. It was magnificent, wonderful chaos - for a while.

There's also a specific paragraph on government websites:

The Conservative Party believes that government websites should not be treated like secure government offices or laboratories, where public access is to be controlled as tightly as possible.

We see government websites as being more like a mixture of private building and public spaces, such as squares and parks: places where people can come together to discuss issues and solve problems.

Where large amounts of people with similar concerns come together, for example filling in VAT forms or registering children for schools, we will take the opportunity to let people interact and support each other.

Again... Mr Steinberg, I presume? I'm not sure quite what that's getting at; discussion forums? opening up Sidewiki-esque comments on 'standard' pages? (That idea was first aired at the 2008 Barcamp.)

There's a commitment to 'a level playing ?eld for open source IT': welcome words, but we already have an on-paper commitment to a level playing field... or arguably, ever-so-slightly slanted in favour of open source. I haven't changed my mind since January this year, when I concluded that we need a 'specific high-profile victory for Open Source, to give it real momentum in government'. And those mythical 100 Days could be the time to deliver that.

Elsewhere there's confirmation of notions already floated: transparency of senior salaries and contract spending, a 'right to data', online publication of expenses claims at Parliament and council levels, and so on.

In some aspects, there's little to separate the rhetoric between Labour and the Tories. But whereas Labour has had the opportunity to make ambitious changes happen - and hasn't always taken them, you get the sense of energy and ambition in the Tories' promises.

There are specific actions and measurable commitments in this document: and it must be said, there's evidence of the Tories practising what they're preaching - use of WordPress and Drupal, publication of government IT policy (admittedly, someone else's) in commentable form, publication of front-bench expenses via Google Spreadsheet.

Things could be about to get very, very interesting.

Location based social networks - are you over it already? It feels like location is all we ever hear about anymore, especially this week leading up to SXSW.

We're excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-ups What Twitter's Geolocation API Makes Possible and The Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived. But it's getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness.

Sponsor

1. That Phrase: "Location, Location, Location"

   You're going to hear journalists use it far too much. Want to know where it came from? Language sleuth William Safire investigated for the NYT last year and concluded that the phrase was probably first used in a 1926 real estate classified ad in the Chicago Tribune: "Attention salesmen, sales managers: location, location, location, close to Rogers Park." Don't you feel more savvy now?

2. Too Many Startups?

   We're under embargo on almost all of them, but we can tell you there are at least 25 companies making location-related announcements at SXSW this week. Probably more. The Dunbar number of startups in a particular market, if you will, is something like 5. More than that and most people stop taking new entrants seriously. It's one thing to offer different technologies along the value chain of location, but sharing your location and aggregating messages by things like hashtag are two very crowded niches right now. One of my favorites is SitBy.Us, an app that lets you see where your Twitter friends are sitting in a conference session. That's pretty cool.

   You've got to wonder if and when Location will Jump the Shark and what consumer exhaustion for it might mean for the long-term prospects of the market. Everyone wants to be "the Twitter of SXSW 2010" but the fact is that SXSW represented a statistically insignificant increase in Twitter usage, historically speaking.

3. Location Startups "Not Playing Nice"

   There are loads of ways to post your location but it's very hard to get a feel for who exactly is where. SimpleGeo launched a site called Vicarious.ly today that aggregates check-ins across scads of services, all around Austin. It doesn't work very well, though. SimpleGeo's Matt Galligan told us today that the site is really just a proof of concept and that our perception that these startups aren't playing very nice together is very true. "And it's a real shame," he told us. It's hard for a 3rd party service to clearly identify whether these competing services are really talking about the same location, for example. No one tells their users what users on competing services are up to in the same location. Gowalla's Josh Williams says he doesn't know what the problem is and that Gowalla is very open about user data by open standards.

   Update: Galligan pinged us after publication to clarify: "I mostly meant the problem with venue data was because of how awful the *business listings* market is. There's certainly issues with non-connecting venue data but it's a *very* hard problem to solve, so I don't blame them right now. It can, however, be solved in the future."

4. We Need Cross-Service Venue Tracking

   If you're thinking of going to a place, or you're there and wonder who else is, what you need is a place where you can see who has checked in there across all services. For the place to be at the center of your experience, not the service. Michael Arrington says the new AOL Lifestream lets you track particular locations, but that service only supports Foursquare among location services. What we need is something like that across any and every check-in service. That's the kind of thing that data standards can enable.

   Google's Chris Messina told us that the Activity Streams standard has a namespace for "place" and would probably add support for GeoRSS soon, but that so far Google Buzz is the only location service that seems to be supporting it.

5. Gowalla Doesn't Get Enough Love

   Gowalla's API is read-only, meaning that 3rd party apps can't publish check-ins to the service like they can to Foursquare. Gowalla says they are working on it, but they are the underdog already and this isn't helping. AOL's cool new Lifestream product, for example, only supports Foursquare, not Gowalla. That's a real shame. You know what's nice about Gowalla, though? You can see who has checked into a place and when, even if they aren't friends of yours. That's not something that's easy to do with Foursquare at all. It's also much prettier than Foursquare and uses peoples' full names, instead of grade-school-style first names and last initials. Gowalla's API just isn't seeing the adoption that Foursquares is, though. Have you seen Avoider.org for example? That's pretty funny stuff and it's built on top of Foursquare.
   

   The above is for illustration purposes only. I like both these guys just fine.

6. Imagine the Future, It's Going to Be Different

   If location based services ever become popular with the mainstream, every urban area might end up looking like the Foursquare map of downtown Austin this weekend. That means services are going to have to come up with creative and interesting new ways to make that data usable day-to-day and not overwhelming.

   Likewise, when you think about the future, imagine Facebook being a player in this market, because they are going to be soon. It's possible that Facebook and Twitter could be where all these other services meet-up. Brightkite has different features than BlockChalk but we can see what our friends are doing across any of these apps on Facebook, perhaps. And Facebook is where your mom checks-in, if she's not an early adopter.

   Finally, will location tracking be persistent? Loopt right now uses mobile carrier tie-ins to track your location constantly and expose it to a circle of trusted friends. Is that something that all services will enable in the future? Gowalla CEO Josh Williams told us "no way" does he think that will be the dominant model, but Adam Duvander, author of the forthcoming book Mapscripting 101, says he agrees with Loopt: that the value in persistent location tracking will be so compelling that everyone will end up going for it in the end, once proper privacy settings are figured out.

   What do you think, do you think persistent location tracking is the future of location based services?

   These are some of the things I'm thinking about location this week.

   Discuss

   
   

   
   

One option to get round the problem of a high-speed rail line painting a long grey "blight corridor" across the Chilterns and either Oxfordshire or Buckinghamshire (The fate of the Chilterns reveals the limits of localism, 8 March) would be to stitch the HS2 into another existing blight corridor. This was done successfully a decade ago in the routing of HS1, or the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Only at a few places did CTRL/HS1 leave the noisy environs of either an existing railway or one of the motorways.

For nearly 10 years I have been promoting an HS2 route that follows closely the M1, M45/A45 and (further north) M18 and A1(M) on the east side of the Pennines, and M6 Toll and the west coast mainline to the west side. As with HS1 there are a few tricky places, but there are simple solutions such as a two-mile tunnel under the M1 as it threads through Luton. The only objection I have heard is that the M1 corridor is "rather heavily populated"; this objection implies that a route that goes through open countryside, blighting it with noise, is acceptable – well, just you wait and see. The citizens of Buckinghamshire fought off an airport at Wing/Cublington three decades ago, and I can sadly foresee them fighting off this railway too.

And as for Heathrow, well, to me the simplest solution is to extend the Heathrow Express line from Terminal 5 to run beside the M25, using part of the Egham to Weybridge line, and so provide a link into the Woking-Basingstoke-Southampton electric 100mph line. True, it would only be suitable for trains like the shorter Eurostars, but it would provide a service direct to Terminals 1, 2, 3 and 5, linking in via HS2 at Cricklewood.

Peter Stephens

Wootton, Bedfordshire

• Not to connect the proposed high-speed rail network directly to Heathrow airport would be another major missed infrastructure opportunity for this country (Rail route towards Birmingham revealed for high-speed network, 11 March). We now have a chance to build a modern multi-modal transport hub, which would significantly boost London's business competitiveness and accessibility. It is not rocket science to understand the travel efficiencies inherent in taking passengers via the airport, rather than having them traipse from one connection to another with baggage in hand.

It is a mystery why we struggle in the UK with the idea of integrated transport planning. Rail and air (and road) are not competing transport systems, but complementary elements in what should be a comprehensive multi-faceted network.

Demand for air travel will continue to grow and we need to build on recent investments at Heathrow with a third runway and high-speed rail link. Our challenge is to offer business and leisure travellers a better experience and protect the UK's competitive advantage. Not servicing Heathrow directly by the high-speed rail would be to fail in that challenge.

Frank Wingate

Chief executive, West London Business

• High-speed rail is something we really need. The use of trains to go anywhere is wonderfully sound for the environment. So could someone tell me why my partner and I this week paid £75 each for a return to London, plus a £40 taxi fare to the station because there is no bus service at the time I needed the train. I sat on the train, packed to capacity, thinking that I could have taken the car, paid for a day's parking, the congestion charge and dinner for two, and still been better off.

Eean Wyatt-Lees

Salisbury, Wiltshire

• Which infrastructure development do you think would add more value to your life/business: (a) a high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham, to be extended to Scotland in due course, which will benefit a few people, cutting their travel time by 20 minutes; or (b) extending optic fibre cabling to 95% of homes and businesses so we can have genuine high-speed broadband of the calibre that Korea is already building.

The costs are roughly the same. If we are going to invest £60bn in the UK infrastructure, I think it is a no-brainer that we should apply it to the digital communications future, not the historic infrastructure that made the Victorians great. Tell your MPs (of all parties) before they make a stupid mistake.

Stephen Milton

St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex

Photo by D.J. Norton

Looking through his late father’s photograph collection in early 2005, Mark Norton had a brainwave:

With more careful study of the pictures I was able to work out exactly where many of them had been taken.  Subtle clues from one would help in locating another.  A magnifying glass and old and new maps helped in the investigation.  As the jigsaw came together, two things hit me.  One was that my father had carefully recorded Birmingham prior to the inner ring road development.  The other was that the city had lost a huge number of beautiful old buildings in the name of ‘progress’.

The resulting project is an exciting and striking record of Birmingham’s past and present, offering comparative views of the city centre in the 1950s and 60s, juxtaposted with modern day images of the same locations.

Bull St, Dale End High Street, 1962

Bull St, Dale End High Street: Now

Photo by D.J. Norton is a rich and informative website, bristling with historical information, interesting images of Birmingham and information about our exciting and varied architectural history.

Mark Norton also has a book, In My Father’s Footsteps, which is available online, with at least 20% of the royalties donated to Asthma UK.