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A new Bed & Breakfast in the Isle of Man

I'm proud to launch the new website for the Bed and Breakfast accommodation at Cronk-e-Dhooney Cottages in the Isle of Man.

Recently awarded a four star rating and located in the hamlet of Ballakilpheric near Colby, the cottage is just a short drive from the airport, the golden beach and sunset views of Port Erin, the working village folk museum at Cregneash, the historic capital of the Island at Castletown, and many more things for visitors to see.

If you're looking for a comfortable, family-run B&B in the middle of the beautiful Manx countryside - perfect for outdoor activities such as walking, cycling or just as a base for exploring the Island - look no further than Cronk-e-Dhooney.

The website is based on Drupal to make it easily maintainable, includes some mapping from OpenStreetMap and also photos that I took in and around the property to help show it off to prospective visitors.

Posted in Drupal, Isle of Man at 10:00 PM on Sunday 27 April 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Bed and Breakfast Drupal OpenStreetMap Isle of Man Tourist Accommodation

What to do on the Isle of Man?

I got an email from a colleague (author of some great Mac apps) the other day asking what was good to do on the Isle of Man. It's not something I actually think about very often, so it was nice to spend some time thinking about all the things I love about the Island, and coming up with some recommendations...

I'd probably recommend visiting Peel for a wander round the old streets, maybe the castle and the coast, especially at sunset. Just south of there is a little place called Dalby/Niarbyl where there are some more great coastal views and walks as well as a pub and cafe.

Also, I'd suggest the village of Cregneash and possibly its living museum. Port St Mary is a nice quaint fishing village just down the hill from there.

In Douglas the museum is worth at least a quick visit.

Up north, the Point of Ayre is quite breathtaking. The village of Laxey on the way up there is quite pretty.

If they know anything about the annual TT races, perhaps a trip around the course would be worth doing.

Otherwise, I'd just say head for the hills for a bit of a walk.

I was typing it out on the iPod touch, so the responses were getting shorter as I went on. I also didn't know what his friends would be interested in seeing, or how much time they'd have, so I tried to keep it general enough that any visitor would like it (though I'm aware it centres around places I love to go to take photos). I must say, despite my 'quick visit' recommendation, the Manx Museum in Douglas is well worth more than just a quick visit, as long as you've got the time to spare.

Have you been to the Island, or live there? What would you add to the list?

Posted in Isle of Man at 1:07 AM on Monday 17 March 2008 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Isle of Man tourism tourist attractions

Holiday cottages on Drupal

Last night saw the launch of the new Smeale Farm Cottages website (first launched back in 2000), helping market a new holiday cottage that they recently opened.

The new site features an improved availability calendar that makes it both easier to maintain and easier for visitors to understand as well as the ability for the customer to edit any of the pages themselves whenever they want to change any of the information.

Also featured is a location map thanks to data from the OpenStreetMap project.

As you might expect, the website is built using the Drupal open source content management system with the addition of the image module, a customised version of the zen theme and a heavily customised availability module to drive the calendars.

I'm hoping to release this availability calendar module back to the community as a new module in the near future.

Posted in Drupal, Isle of Man, Web at 7:41 PM on Thursday 7 February 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Drupal Freelance Isle of Man

Art Auction for Age Concern Isle of Man

A group of Applied Business students from St. Ninian's High School in the Isle of Man is holding an art auction on 29th January in aid of Age Concern. Over 40 local artists have donated artwork for sale in the auction which will hopefully produce a nice donation to charity as well as a great thing to put on the organisers' CVs.

The organisation of this event significantly trumps my involvement in a Young Enterprise group as part of a similar scheme when I was at school. We managed to make some novelty items and Christmas decorations as well as coming out with a slight profit for members of the group, but nothing quite on the scale of this.

If you're going to be on the Isle of Man next Tuesday, go and put a bid in for a piece of local artwork, perhaps a photo of the Point of Ayre Lighthouse ;)

Posted in Isle of Man, Photography at 6:46 PM on Tuesday 22 January 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Isle of Man art auction photography

Where to find maps of the Isle of Man

When I first started adding road network data for the Isle of Man into the OpenStreetMap project, there were only a few map sites online that had maps of the Island, and none as easy to use as the Google Maps service (which at the time did not include maps of the Island, and still doesn't to this day) which rocked the world of web mapping when it launched.

As I recall, the sites with maps of the Island at that time were limited to MultiMap and the Ordnance Survey Get a map service.

Things have come a long way since then though. The OpenStreetMap maps of the Isle of Man are not too far away from being complete (with a little help), but aren't yet ready for end users looking for detailed maps. Many of the other map providers do, however, have great coverage of the Island in their maps. Here's a bit of an overview detailing the merits of each of them:

Site	Overview	Description
192.com		Map of roads, railways and railways stations (marked incorrectly with British Rail logos), rivers, plantations, reservoirs and long distance footpaths. Does not allow zooming in to towns for detailed street maps.
Ask.com		Map of roads, rivers, some plantations and reservoirs. Includes detailed street map information.
Google Maps		Map of Island outline.
Microsoft Live Search		Map of terrain, roads, railways and railways stations, rivers, plantations and reservoirs. Includes detailed street map information. Island incorrectly attributed to the UK.
Multimap		Map of roads. Does not include detailed street map information (streets disappear from map beyond a certain zoom level) but does include the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 map of the Island if you hover your mouse over the 'map' toggle to the left of the map.
OpenStreetMap		Map of roads, railways and railways stations, rivers, plantations, reservoirs and some long distance footpaths. The town street maps are not very detailed yet.
People's Map		Map of main roads and some rivers. The map disappears past a certain zoom level, but they do have excellent aerial imagery for the whole of the Island.
Yahoo! Maps		Map of terrain, roads, railways and railways stations (marked incorrectly with British Rail logos), rivers, some plantations and reservoirs. Includes detailed street map information.

I've included all the draggable ("slippy") map providers - or at least the ones I can think of right now - to give a bit of an overview of how their coverage differs, and also give a bit of a glimpse into the differences between their cartography and general feel of the maps. Also worth a mention here are the street maps that the Government provide for most towns across the Island.

With all these mapping services providing maps of the Island for free, is it really still worth continuing to build up the map data in the OpenStreetMap project? Of course it is! These maps are nothing but that: static maps, and some of them really great ones at that. They are great if all you want is a static map, somewhere to share a single location with someone else, or even the ability to overlay your own information on top of the map using that provider's API.

The whole point behind the OpenStreetMap project though (and to a certain extent, the People's Map project) is that the underlying map geodata is available and re-usable under a free license for you to be creative and do what you like with that data.

Maybe you're working in conservation and want to create a map showing all the rivers and different habitats on the Island, but not include roads. Maybe you are a walker and want to create a map that shows just the footpaths on the Island. Maybe you run a local listings site and you want to create a map that shows only the locations you want it to show and hide things that may not be of interest to your visitors. There are many possibilities, and the great thing is that if you have an idea, you can go off and use the data we're building up, allowing you to fulfil your idea without having to use the prescribed maps that are provided by the big providers.

Note: all the maps included above are copyrighted by their respective owners, and are included here under fair dealing clause for comparison of their individual benefits.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 10:11 PM on Saturday 11 August 2007 | Comments (5)
Tags: Isle of Man maps mapping

Isle of Man mapping party

The Isle of Man is going to be having its first OpenStreetMap mapping party on Saturday 1st September, with the main aim of mapping the Island's capital, Douglas.

(I'm not going to be around after Sunday morning unfortunately - I need to fly back to Stuttgart - but if others are then Ramsey may also be a good target if we get Douglas completed.)

Details are pretty sparse at present but I'll be fleshing out the Isle of Man mapping party information over on the OpenStreetMap wiki. If you're interested, please add yourself to the list over there.

If anyone is thinking of travelling from outside of the Island and would like advice on getting to the Island, or somewhere to stay, let me know.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 2:14 PM on Saturday 21 July 2007 | Comments (2)
Tags: OpenStreetMap Mapping party Mapping geo Isle of Man

State of The (Manx) Map

The map of the Isle of Man is the featured image this week on OpenStreetMap so I think now is a good time for the State of The (Manx) Map post that I've been considering doing for a while. (Obviously borrowing ever so slightly from the name of the upcoming State of The Map conference in Manchester... have you registered yet?).

Overall coverage

The overall coverage of the Island is great thanks to the assistance of the Isle of Man Government, as you can see from the map below. Much of the detail from the government map has been included in the OpenStreetMap data, although I'm sure there are some features that have been overlooked to date.

The gaps in the map start to show when you zoom in to specific areas. Taking Douglas as an example, I'll show what level of detail is available and what will need local assistance (and possibly a mapping party) to get the town maps to a usable level of detail.

Douglas in detail

Douglas has the majority of its major routes mapped already, but it's missing a lot of the detail in between, like smaller roads, housing estates, pathways and the like. Where these do exist in the map already, they usually do not have a name associated with them, and almost never have all of the cul-de-sacs and such mapped out.

The likes of Castletown have more of their roads covered (it's smaller, and much easier to cover them) but likewise doesn't have the names of many of the smaller streets. Port St Mary is covered pretty well, including names, thanks to the support of one guy and his bike.

If you live in a place that's missing detail, you have an opportunity to help... Let's try and beat Google Maps to coverage of the Island!

Mapping party

If anybody from the Island is interested in doing some mapping (taking a GPS unit out and writing down street names as you go), especially around Douglas and Ramsey, then let me know. I'm likely to be back on the Island for most of the last week in August, so perhaps a little mapping party is in order then...

On a related note, it's great to see as well that some other free maps of the Isle of Man are surfacing on Wikipedia, licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Best of all, the image is in vector format and so can easily be altered to illustrate things with ease (it's perhaps a good starting point for the TT Course map I started last month).

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 6:47 PM on Wednesday 27 June 2007 | Comments (1)
Tags: OpenStreetMap Isle of Man map geo

Wikipedia gets Manx road maps

In just over two weeks the Isle of Man will be celebrating the Centenary of the famous Isle of Man TT Races and Wikipedia's section of articles around the topic of motorcycle racing on the Island has been quickly expanding, reflecting the interest in the event.

With OpenStreetMap's map of the Isle of Man improving, I offered a little while back to create a map of the TT course to help illustrate the articles on Wikipedia.

It turned out not to be quite so simple, however. The course itself is covered on OpenStreetMap but the location of points of interest around the course is not. The information about milestones, viewing points and other points of note around the course is available in part on Wikipedia, and more so on other sites, though nowhere is it available in the public domain or in a reusable fashion.

I'm ever hopeful that I might hear back from the Department of Tourism at some point, allowing the use of this important location data, or perhaps from someone who's actually travelled the course and collected this information for themselves with their GPS. In the meantime I've gone ahead and created a basic overview map of the course as a bit of a teaser.

When I get back to looking at this, I also need to find a more efficient way of taking OpenStreetMap data of the Isle of Man, filtering out the bits I want and highlighting them on top of a faded base map. I'm a little embarassed to admit I just used GIMP to make this simple overview map.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 12:13 AM on Thursday 10 May 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: Isle of Man TT Isle of Man Maps OpenStreetMap

Manx Government helps OpenStreetMap

When I wrote my last post about the difference between Google Maps coverage of the Isle of Man and that of OpenStreetMap, I hadn't realised that the OSM version could have been even better without too much more work.

I discovered it only recently, but two weeks prior to my post, Nick Black had posted to his blog about mapping the Isle of Man as well. Nick had been in touch with the Isle of Man's Department of Local Government and the Environment (DLGE, or DoLGE) to see if OpenStreetMap could benefit from any of the mapping data that the government own the rights to. They responded positively to the request and offered a licence to freely derive information from their 1:100,000 map of the Island for use in the OpenStreetMap project.

In doing this, the Isle of Man Government is one of the few cutting edge (a term I wouldn't normally find myself applying to government) organisations leading the way in contributing its data - even if only a subset - to the world of open geodata.

At a scale of 1cm on the map to 1km on the ground, the geodata is only a very simplified version of that collected by the government, yet it can still help tremendously. As Nick pointed out in his post, the Isle of Man did have a fair number of roads covered on OpenStreetMap already, but the coverage was by no means thorough or complete, which is where the new data can help. It helps fill in gaps where roads had not already existed in the database. It helps in the classification of roads between primary (A-roads), secondary (B-roads) and others and helps with assigning the correct reference numbers (e.g., A1) to the roads. The data also helps with the perhaps more difficult to map features such as plantations, peaks, rivers and reservoirs.

Nick has spent some time tracing from the map, as have I, and the open geodata map of the Isle of Man is starting to be beefed up (switch to the Osmarender layer to see the latest map data, though you'll need to zoom in) to include more roads as well as everything else we can derive from the map.

Due to the scale of the government map being used to derive data from, there will be issues in data quality and accuracy, but it is a great start and gives us a broad base set of data to work from, all of which can be improved over time. And it can be improved by anybody who is willing to help. This is still especially important in the towns and villages of the Island where the mapping will still require a lot of work, partly because generalisation on the 1:100,000 map means that many smaller roads are excluded but also because street name data is still something which needs to be collected in other ways - the best of which is by people on the ground who have knowledge of the area.

I wonder if other governments will step forward and offer a helping hand as well?

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 7:56 PM on Friday 30 March 2007 | Comments (1)
Tags: Isle of Man geo open geodata OpenStreetMap Isle of Man Government government maps

Google Maps vs OpenStreetMap

Some of the cartographers on the OpenStreetMap project (which includes the chair of the Society of Cartographers in the UK) got together a few weekends ago for a cartography discussion day to try and clean up the rendering of free geodata from the project. The results of that day are now starting to appear on the maps, with much of the extraneous detail being stripped until you zoom further in, revealing more on each zoom level so as not to clutter the smaller scale maps.

With the changing of the maps I wanted to see how the Isle of Man was looking. I have to say, it's looking even better than the previous big update to mapping.

When I first learned about OpenStreetMap at the Open Geodata Forum I wasn't entirely convinced it would take off, though I was intrigued by the concept. Almost two years down the line and my opinions have definitely changed on that, as have the opinions of many others, including people in the geographic information industry.

To see why my opinions have changed, just compare the open street map of the Isle of Man to the Google Maps version which shows nothing except its name and an outline of the Island (with the Calf of Man joined at the bottom as if a bridge had been built to the islet).

With open geodata anyone can just go in and add new information or alter existing information if there are errors in it (like the link between the Calf and the mainland, for example) but you can't do that on Google Maps. Admittedly the Manx map is still somewhat lacking in certain areas, but it's a work in progress and it's getting there, slowly.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 9:24 PM on Wednesday 14 March 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: Isle of Man Google Maps OpenStreetMap Open geodata geo mapping

Russian 1:500,000 mapping of the Isle of Man

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, they put a lot of energy into mapping the rest of the world, at small scales like the section of map above, but also at larger scales for certain places of key interest to the Soviet government at the time.

The more detailed larger scale maps were deemed by the Ordnance Survey to be copies of British mapping and so although the maps are copyright free (Russia didn't believe in copyright when these maps were being produced) it is questionable as to whether they can be reused in the UK*.

You can read much fascinating information about Soviet mapping on John Davies' Soviet Military Maps of Britain site, but I just wanted to share this interesting Soviet cartography of the Isle of Man with names transposed into Russian.

The original map image is available from the Poehali website.

* The OS specifically call out 1:25000, 1:50000 and 1:100000 mapping, so I hope posting this 1:500000 map extract of the Isle of Man won't cause any problems.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 12:30 AM on Monday 19 February 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: Maps geo Soviet Mapping Cartography

Nollick ghennal as blein vie noa

It's a little late in the day, but just a quick message to say...

Manx: Nollick ghennal as blein vie noa

German: Frohe Weihnachten und ein schönes neues Jahr

English: Merry Christmas and a happy New Year

I had planned to make up a Christmas eCard out of the map of Christmas Island, but having looked at it and discovering it didn't look very christmassy, I decided against it.

I hope you have a great festive season, as I will be having whilst at home on the Isle of Man.

Posted in Isle of Man at 8:08 PM on Monday 25 December 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: christmas new year seasons greetings manx

Free maps get a great new look

The free-to-use maps that volunteers in the OpenStreetMap project have been building over the past year or two have been given a new look. Thanks to the Mapnik project, the new maps look much more like Google Maps et al. and are actually available through the 'slippy map' interface on the OpenStreetMap website instead of having to download the data and generate them locally as had been true until recently (e.g. see the map of Stuttgart I generated recently).

There are a lot of tiles to generate, and it may take some time to generate tiles for the whole world. The focus therefore had initially been on getting England covered, but is now expanding to cover other areas. Nick Black stepped in to render the Isle of Man, where these examples are from.

Free map of Castletown, Isle of Man

Free map of Port Erin and Port St Mary, Isle of Man

These maps are all available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 1:38 PM on Thursday 23 November 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: OpenStreetMap free maps mapping maps geo

Scanning a 1940s map of the Island

I spent much of my evening today scanning in the 1940 Second War Revision map of the Isle of Man. Now that it's all scanned I took the opportunity to have a closer look around some of the places I'm familiar with back on the Island, as well as some things from the past which I'm not so familiar with.

Much has stayed the same on the Island since this map was made at the start of the Second World War, though there have also been some big changes. Towns have grown in size, bypasses have been built to take increasing traffic out of old centres, train lines that used to run from Douglas through St Johns to Peel and Ramsey have been dismantled, and the airport extended from its wartime status as an aerodrome into something a little bigger.

Before I started looking into the grid system used on this map this evening, I hadn't realised that the maps produced during the war weren't yet using the British National Grid for referencing, and instead were using a military grid that also consisted of 1km grid squares - just not the same ones as the National Grid.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 11:15 PM on Thursday 16 November 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: Isle of Man map Ordnance Survey 1940 Second War Revision

Old maps of the Isle of Man

A couple of weeks ago I started looking around on eBay for old maps of the Isle of Man, partly because they may be of some use to the OpenStreetMap project, and partly because it would be really interesting to see what had changed in the past fifty or hundred years around the Island.

The thing that triggered me to go out and find them was the launch of Richard Fairhurst's online browser of the 1930s and 40s Ordnance Survey New Public Edition map of England and Wales. He'd spent quite some time collecting the maps from secondhand shops knowing that 50 years after their publication the copyright on them expired and hence they get released into the Public Domain where anybody can do with the data what they wish. He worked with a couple of other people to scan all of the maps and build a site that lets people browse them and start to build up a copyright-free database of postcodes. It lowers the barriers for people willing to share the locations of their postcodes, and makes it much easier (though less accurate) than the Free The Postcode method of getting people with GPS units to submit precise coordinates for postcodes they know.

But back to the maps of the Island. The one map I was most interested in was the Second War Revision (Sheet 17) published by the Ordnance Survey in 1940. It covers the Isle of Man at a similar scale as the modern Sheet 95 of the Landranger series, but is now in the public domain, having been published 66 years ago under Crown Copyright. It will be a great reference point for extracting data for OpenStreetMap, showing the paths of rivers and roads between towns and villages on the Island. It doesn't really give enough detail to be useful within the towns themselves.

I also found some old street plans of Douglas, Onchan, Ramsey, Port Erin, Port St Mary and Castletown dating back to the late 40s (the Peel plan appears to state Nov 47). They can't be used for anything other than personal interest, as far as I'm aware, because they weren't published under Crown Copyright and the copyright instead falls either under the local authorities of those places, with the cartographers, or with the publisher. All of which mean that the maps won't fall out of copyright until at least 70 years after they were published, or 2017. Or at least, that's as I understand it.

The 1963 Ordnance Survey map (Sheet 87) I also found would have fallen out of copyright a little before that, in 2013, but in reality it probably doesn't give much more information than the 1940 version, and the Island will have long been mapped in OpenStreetMap by that point.

Talking of mapping the Isle of Man, I am planning to do some more mapping of Castletown and Douglas for OpenStreetMap between Christmas and New Year. If anybody is interested in helping out or finding out more, just get in touch. I have a spare GPS unit that can be used as well.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 9:27 PM on Wednesday 15 November 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: Isle of Man maps mapping Ordnance Survey cartography history

OpenStreetMap module for Drupal

For quite some time now I've been thinking about the best way to create a mapping and local information site for the Isle of Man - what will become Mapping.im once ready. Currently it's a very bare, ugly site, so don't pay too much attention to it. Working with the Drupal content management system so much, I naturally thought of that as the way forward, largely because of its flexibility but also because it gives me a good head start in developing a site that can do all sorts of things already, without me having to implement them individually.

I had jotted down some notes in the past about what I wanted out of a site, but never really got quite as far as implementation details. Then earlier this week I went to an old haunt of mine - an Irish bar by where I lived in the first few months of being here in Stuttgart - and sat down with my notepad and pen (both of which I carry at all times). I wanted to start jotting down some more fine grained requirements for what I want, and how I may go about integrating this into Drupal as a module that other people can apply for their own local areas as well.

Then last night I started coding the OpenStreetMap module up. I'm hoping - as long as I can spend enough time on the project - that I will soon have the ability to create a local information site for the Isle of Man, based on top of a map from the OpenStreetMap project to which I've already contributed a large amount of data for the island to get the mapping process started. (Since I started earlier this year a number of other people have joined in to flesh out that data even more, which is handy because being in Germany right now, I can't add too much).

I would have spent the weekend working on the module but I'm actually travelling over to Munich in the morning to meet up with a bunch of OpenStreetMappers for a Mapping Weekend to map the centre of Munich.

Posted in Drupal, Geographic, Isle of Man at 9:35 PM on Friday 20 October 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: openstreetmap geo mapping isle of man

[placename].im update

I found out today a little more information about the .im domain situation I was talking about. I heard back from the guy selling the peel.im domain about the price he was asking for, and also heard back from the registrars about their policy on reserving names relating to some places but not other.

If you're interested in buying the domain for Peel, Isle of Man - peel.im - then you are looking at paying around $1000 (he's "willing to let this one go pretty cheaply"). That's only about 11 times the price it was purchased for. It does seem a shame to have this domain taken away from the people of Peel, and it's a shame that it was allowed to happen, but perhaps he's not broken any of the rules.

It's not for me to say what's right or not about the registering of that domain, but I would like to help prevent it happening to other domains that relate to place names on the Isle of Man. The registry inform me that the place name domains that appeared to have been reserved have not been reserved because they are placenames, but because they have been offered to the owners of the third level domains (e.g. castletown.im reserved for the owners of castletown.org.im) who have until the end of September to claim their domain (costing only £5 initially). After that date, if the second level domains haven't been taken on by the owners of the corresponding third level domain then the domains will be released to the public.

With no policy in place to hold back the names of towns and villages that hadn't previously been registered, I think it's important that something be done to protect them.

Perhaps there should be more publicity on the Island (not being there at the moment, I don't know what publicity there has been already) to convince local authorities that they should invest in their name on the internet. Perhaps for some places, names should be reserved by Isle of Man Tourism or by Manx National Heritage. If these organisations don't pick up on their relevant domains, perhaps there should be a sort of Open Domain project to help protect those domains? I'd donate a domain to that sort of project if others were to do it too.

[stepping down from my soapbox for now]

Posted in Isle of Man at 11:10 PM on Monday 11 September 2006 | Comments (4)
Tags: .im domain .im domain isle of man

Isle of Man opens up domain registry

I discovered today that the .im domain registry has been opened up to be more freely available, allowing anyone with an interest to buy a .im domain. The registry has been opened up to be more like the .tv domain which appealed especially to TV companies. The maintainers of the Isle of Man's domain hope that .im will to appeal to Internet Messaging companies.

Previously the domains were only available to Isle of Man based organisations who could prove they had a right to the name; the process was manual, and the domain had to be approved by a committee before it could be created. Now, the process has been automated, has a pretty website, and is available to anyone, whether based on the Island or not. The domains are still checked up-front against a list of 'inappropriate domains' and apparently vetted by a committee (after the automated registration process).

Not having heard about the opening up of the domain registry back in July, I was a little confused when this email arrived in my inbox this morning:

www.Peel.im Domain for sale
Hello,

I am putting the domain name www.Peel.im up for auction and am currently taking bids for it
Please serious offers only as this name is getting a lot of interest. Please bid on the domain by
clicking on FOR SALE at www.Peel.im or by emailing me directly at <email removed>
Thank You
Erin

I thought it was a little weird because previously you could only register third level domains (eg yourname.co.im). Wanting to know more, I went to the nic.im website to check it out, seeing that peel.im is in fact registered and being put up for sale by someone in San Francisco.

It seems a shame to me that people can hold 'local domains' for a ransom. In my opinion, [placename].im domains should be reserved for use by local organisations for a relevant local website, be that perhaps a local government website (though the move of Douglas Borough Council from douglas.org.im to douglas.gov.im instead of douglas.im suggests that maybe needn't be the case) or at least a website that's related to that location. Checking some of the other domains, like ballasalla.im, castletown.im, douglas.im, laxey.im, they do appear to have been reserved by the registry, but there were a number which I tried which haven't been reserved and still run the risk of having some opportunist buying them and holding them for ransom.

Perhaps the rest of the [placename].im domains should be placed on the reserved list to prevent this from happening, though I'm not sure how you'd choose the rightful owner of these domains if they weren't all reserved for government use, for example.

On a related note, it's interesting that my design for geodan.org appears to have been inspired by the 1997 version of the nic.im website. This wasn't intentional, though there must have been some subconscious link reminding me of this website design from almost 10 years ago. How retro.

Posted in Isle of Man at 2:45 PM on Sunday 10 September 2006 | Comments (2)
Tags: isle of man .im domain

Reintroduction of a language

Whilst home in the Isle of Man at the end of August I visited my great uncle. He's approaching 100 and is one of the few local people still left in the village of Cregneash, much of which is now operating as a living museum. He's also a bit of a film star, having had a few small roles in locally produced movies - Waking Ned perhaps being the most famous. Being so well known he gets a lot of visitors, and this time was no exception. When I popped by, he had a student visiting asking questions about Cregneash for a university project, and also a teacher from the only Manx language primary school on the Island.

The school, Bunscoill Gaelgagh in St John's, uses the medium of Manx for teaching primary school children. The majority of classes are tought in Manx, with only about 10% being taught in English. They also get to learn French as a third language.

Having learnt a little Manx when I was younger, and being keen to refresh my memory of it when starting university back in 2000, I wanted to find out how the first generation of native Manx speakers in a long time are getting to grips with the language. (I still haven't gone back and refreshed my knowledge of it, though I'd still love to, if I can find a good Manx distance learning course to take).

I had my doubts about how successful the Manx-medium school would be when I first heard about it. It turns out, however, that the children are doing very well, being fluent Manx speakers, fluent English speakers and are picking up French very easily as well.

It'll be interesting to see what happens in years to come, how many people will be speaking Manx again, how often it will be used, and what it will be used for. As you can imagine, re-introducing a language almost from scratch will be a difficult, and probably quite long process. Being a descendant of one of the last native Manx speakers, I look forward to the day when I will hear people speaking Manx to one another in everyday life. Hopefully by then I will have actually learnt some, and will be able to join in.

Posted in Isle of Man at 8:55 PM on Monday 4 September 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: isle of man manx manx language language

National Pride

With today being Tynwald Day, the national day of the Isle of Man, and yesterday being Independence Day for Americans, it seems as good a time as any to write about what I've seen in Germany recently in relation to a massively boosted sense of national pride. Or at least visible national pride.

When I first arrived to live in Germany I didn't really notice it. But after a while, and after travelling to a few other places, I noticed a distinct lack of something here in Germany. Flags. Wherever I went there were very few black, red and gold German flags. It was only every now and then that it struck me how few and far between they seemed to be.

Then, in the run up to the World Cup here in Stuttgart, flags started to appear much more regularly. I think it's only natural that football would bring out people's desires to show their support for their team, especially when there are so many other countries coming to visit, each of whom will be doing exactly the same. But it's very strange to suddenly see so many flags, when previously there had been so few.

The sight of so many German flags around has been quite an impressive sight - and actually quite moving. It's not until you talk to local people about the distinct lack of flags - and sudden influx - that you start to realise how difficult it is for some to feel comfortable identifying with such a sense of national pride. The flag, and national pride, still seems to worry some people a little. Often where flags are flown, or identities associated with, they are of the region and not of the country as a whole.

As an outsider, or Auslander as we're known here, it's great to see that national pride, and from people I've spoken to, it gives them perhaps that little boost to know that outsiders see German people's national pride as a really positive thing.

This situation could well be different dependent on where in the country you are, and who you speak to, but it's something I've found fascinating, especially since the onset of the World Cup. It'll be interesting to see what happens with all the flags after the game has finished. I for one hope they keep flying high everywhere you look.

Posted in Isle of Man, Stuttgart at 11:56 PM on Wednesday 5 July 2006 | Comments (1)
Tags: germany pride national pride

Isle of Man mentioned at Where 2.0

The Isle of Man got another mention at a conference today (this time it was Where 2.0, last time, a presentation at reboot 8) relating to the mapping work that a number of us from/on the Isle of Man have been working on for the OpenStreetMap project.

The OpenStreetMap project actually has a broad coverage of the island, admittedly with large chunks still missing, but it's a great start. Compare that with Google who seem to have decided against buying the Manx road network for their Google Maps site, despite their coverage of most of the rest of Europe. Ask maps on the other hand do have data for the Isle of Man, as well as some great high resolution imagery of the towns.

For businesses, organisations and individuals, buying data from the likes of Navteq and Ordnance Survey would allow some use of maps, though they would be heavily restricted with what they could do with them. Whilst they are pretty much guaranteed to be of a certain standard, they must pay a high price for that privelage: one which is not easily afforded by small businesses, organisations and individuals who just want to be creative with maps.

Building up our own open source dataset means that people will be able to use road information for many different purposes, with credit to the project, and hopefully at the same time give a little input back into the project as well.

Much of the work I've been doing with regard to the project of late has not been actual mapping - it's difficult when such a long way from the place - but instead research into meta data for the tracks that I've already created on the island. It turns out that the Isle of Man Government site is a treasure trove of information about road closures, which proves a great source for road numbers and names as well as starting and end points. Add in a dash of local knowledge and I can begin to build up a database of roads on the Isle of Man with which I can tag the streets I previously had no metadata recorded for.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 11:32 PM on Tuesday 13 June 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: open source openstreetmap isle of man where2006 geo maps mapping

Mapping the Isle of Man on Openstreetmap

Back at the end of last year I bought myself a relatively cheap GPS unit - the Garmin eTrex personal navigator. I had wanted one for a few years and frankly it felt strange having gone through two related degrees, being interested in the area, and yet still not owning one of my own. For a long time I had felt left out, not being able to take part in things like Geocaching, easily geotagging my photos or helping expand open source mapping databases.

For the first few weeks that I had the device, I spent some time working out what situations it would work under - from being in the open, to keeping it in my pocket, to being surrounded by trees, buildings and even inside trains - and what sort of accuracy it could achieve. Whilst doing that I was also building up my database of waypoints around Stuttgart.

Christmas time came, and it was time to head home for a short break. It was interesting holding the GPS up to the window on the plane, seeing the acceleration as we accelerated down the runway. This was all experimentation though, in the lead up to my main plan of action for when I got back to the Isle of Man.

I wanted to drive as many of the island's roads as possible, taking tracklogs as I went, to allow me to add them to Openstreetmap, the open source database of streets around the world. It has taken me quite some time in the weeks since, but I've finally mapped just about all of the roads I drove (or at least the ones where the GPS was tracking). You can see the result by zooming in to the Isle of Man on the site.

The mapping of the Island is nowhere near complete (it's mostly the southern end that I concentrated on), and now that I'm back in Stuttgart, I want to see if I can find people located in the Isle of Man with a similar interest in opening up this sort of level of mapping to the public. Anyone with a GPS (and computer connection) can help out by driving some of the remaining roads, or even fixing areas of the map that I've inevitably not mapped as correctly as I would have liked to have done.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 12:11 AM on Saturday 28 January 2006 | Comments (9)
Tags: gis openstreetmap mapping geo isle of man isleofman gps open source opensource

Tynwald Day

On the 5th July each year the Isle of Man holds a public holiday for Tynwald Day. This is the one time each year when recent laws of the island must be promulgated - or read to the atendees - in both English and Manx Gaelic in order for them to continue to have effect.

You can read more about Tynwald Day in the Wikipedia or see my photos from last years proceedings in the photo gallery section of my site.

It was rather disappointing googling for Tynwald Day to find that the Isle of Man Government haven't updated their own page about the day since the Queen attended in 2003. As our only national day, I would have thought that it would be really important to have an up to date information page about it on their website.

Update: It is listed in the tourism events calendar, but that's about it, and very little detail is given.

Posted in Isle of Man at 1:31 PM on Tuesday 5 July 2005 | Comments (1)
Tags: isle of man tynwald day manx

Photos of my dogs

A personal blog wouldn't be a real blog if I didn't post some photos of my pets, so over the past few days I've been taking some photos whilst experimenting with my new Canon EOS 300D camera. I have three dogs who live with my family - Lucy, Willow and Buster. They're all lovely but ever so slightly hyperactive. All the time.

Here is a photo of each of them in turn:

The cats may be next, if they'll pose for a photo. Like true cats they enjoy their sleep, and I rarely see them awake!

Posted in Isle of Man, Photography at 12:21 AM on Monday 4 April 2005 | Comments (0)
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Towards a wireless Isle of Man

A few weeks back I came across a wi-fi hotspot in the departure lounge of the Isle of Man Airport - useful too, as the flight I was supposed to be catching was cancelled due to technical problems. The hotspot was the first I'd heard of on the island and at the time I couldn't find out much about it, except for the fact that it was part of a trial, and as such would be running as a free service. It was only tonight that I discovered more about the wi-fi trials, with another public area hotspot already being in operation and others on the way this year. The scheme is part of the Isle of Man Government's e-business strategy to promote the island to the wider business community whilst also making services more accessible to Manx residents.

These public hotspots, which are running as a free service for a year, are currently located at the Airport (near Castletown) and the Villa Marina (Douglas) with further hotspots planned for the NSC sports complex, the Manx Museum and the Sea Terminal - all in Douglas, the home of about half of the island's population. Other wi-fi hotspots are being promoted in hotels such as the Ascot and also a new bar and grill called Cunninghams, based in Douglas. Almost certainly there will be others but these are just two of the private sector hotspots I've heard of lately.

It is great to see that the island is taking up the wireless revolution, but it would be even better to see them embracing more wireless broadband technologies which offered high speed data access to rural communities. Half of the island's population live in the main conurbation of Douglas and Onchan, and many of the rest live within a short distance of the other towns of the island (many of which house a telephone exchange) but there are a large number of people living in the countryside who have no access to broadband at all. The government has been good at offering grants for ISDN, ADSL, and more recently even wireless broadband links, but there are restrictions as to who can use them. To make it viable for the company offering the services, they have to target appartment blocks and small out-of-ADSL-reach communities but still can't really target lone households unless they happen to be in the path of those links planned already.

Manx Telecom, the sole provider of telecommunications on the island, has always been at the forefront of mobile phone technology, testing the first European 3G networks and also now high speed HSDPA links, which could feasibly bring broadband to everybody else. I am keen to see how that progresses but judging by the lack of services launched off the 3G tests, I won't hold my breath.

Posted in Communications, Isle of Man at 12:16 AM on Friday 1 April 2005 | Comments (2)
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