Keep your London crime map and Nokia music - I’ve got my social action widget

Three new projects from the past few weeks prove once again that it’s not quality or usefulness that gets the hype, it’s the sexiness of the brand.

Nokia’s Come With Music proposition was hailed as a breakthrough in downloadable music purely for the fact that your files wouldn’t self destruct after 12 months of use. Don’t get too excited - they are still locked into  DRM. But wait! You can, get this, transfer them from your phone… to your computer! Just not your iPod. And any release that’s main message is: “parents, buy this for your kids so they don’t get nicked BitTorrenting music” is a bit cynical.

Meanwhile Boris Johnson has unveiled with much fanfare the London crime map - a mashup of the Google maps API and Met Police crime data. US police forces have been doing this for some time and with better quality data. The London version is limited and doesn’t give you much insight into your neighborhood’s potential for kicking off. My street has average crime while two streets over, they have high crime. Should I be pleased or worried that the criminals are on their way?

The most creative and least heralded project is the new widget that promotes social action. It is based on the AdWords idea of dynamically matching widget data to the content of the page it is sitting on. But instead of promoting dreary hosting companies or weight loss pills, this suggests social or voluntary action you can get involved in. It’s mostly US-focused right now, although the UK’s PledgeBank site is one of the sites feeding in data. It’s an excellent idea, well-executed. And much more interesting than DRM music or data-lite crime maps.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Leave a Reply