Don loves Bath not OSM
It’s not all grumbling here. I quite like this leaflet by Don Foster MP, which recently showed up in the system
He gives the impression of bouncing around his Bath constituency and being rather keen on it.
You can tell it’s from this year because it’s got that friendly:
Map reproduced from Ordnance Survey data by permission of Ordnance Survey, (C) Crown copyright 2009 All rights reserved
which means that when his expenses are disclosed we can go in and find out whether anything has been paid to the Ordnance Survey for reproduction.
What’s OSM? It’s the free on-line map system made by volunteers — just like you people who have been kind enough to upload your leaflets! — for everyone’s benefit, that we use to pinpoint the location of each leaflet.
We couldn’t do this with Ordnance Survey maps because they require a lot of money even for something as small, non-profit and totally incidental as our election leaflet database — probably to cover their high administrative cost of any sale and use in an on-line window. If it doesn’t make them enough money, it can’t happen.
One thing that’s interesting about this leaflet is it appears to be a campaign leaflet for an MP. You thought there was a Euro-election going on, didn’t you? That’s interesting.
Actually, what captured my attention was the bit about Don taking a government minister down the Combe Down stone mines in 1998. Focus groups show that voters respond to pictures of politicians actually doing things, rather than simply posing in front of a scene like a plant.
I like it because I am a caver who has explored the stone mines in Bath when I was in university.
Hang on…
That bastard is having them filled in!
Maybe I don’t like him so much. I’ll bet those lovely mines were there long before people built houses on them. Just as the rivers were there before the suburbs expanded into the flood plains.
Oh well.
What’s an i-Trip, and what was the problem with them anyway?
The iTrip is quite a handy device for transmitting your music from your iPod over FM radio so that you can pick it up in your car stereo or home hifi. It’s an alternative for people who don’t want those silly cassette adaptors or don’t have an auxillary input to their car stereo/hifi. Because it transmits over FM it was technically illegal since you need to have a license to broadcast FM, but due to it’s extremely short range (only a few metres) I guess this chap managed to organise a legal exemption. While it is right to sort this out I think it’s very unlikely that anyone would actually have been prosecuted for broadcasting ‘pirate radio’ using an iTrip.
I expect he got the OS map from http://www.election-maps.co.uk, which basically allows some free use of OS maps for electoral purposes.
Election-maps is quite handy, had to laugh at the front page picture though
I really liked this post. Can I copy it to my site? Thank you in advance.
The comment above looks like a spam.
By all means. Blog posts are intended to be copied and excerpted — especially if you include a link back to the original post on its site.