How much can you trust online maps?

The concept of Information Literacy was fairly prominent in Knowledge Management a few years ago but seems to have lost potency recently, which is a shame as it is important to know how reliable information sources are and how they can be checked. My experience with online maps helps to show this.

I use Google Maps a lot and was already aware that there are some quality issues with these, e.g. several roads near me are incorrectly named, but I persevere with it because it comes with the iPod touch and a main competitor is now owned by Microsoft!


Tonight I am going to a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe. These are peripatetic meetings and move around London depending on who is hosting each one.

Tonight's meeting is at the London Development Agency (LDA) and this map taken from their website shows where they are located.

It's quite easy to find but I wanted a local map of the area on my iPod touch because that's what I always do when going to meetings in new places. Better safe than sorry, as they say.


Using the Google Maps application on my iPod touch, I searched for the LDA by their street address, i.e. 197 Blackfriars Road, London.

The "A" pin shows where Google Maps thinks 197 Blackfriars Road is.

Actually, Blackfriars Road is the large yellow road running down the right-hand side of the map so the pin is not very close to it at all.

The only good news about this result is that the positioning is so bad that it is clearly wrong and so you know that it can be ignored.


My next attempt was to find the location on Google Maps using the LDA's postcode, SE1 8AA.

A London postcode covers just a few buildings (sometimes only one) so a postcode search is normally good enough to find a location.

I also preferred to search by postcode because it requires less typing!

This time the pin is even further away from the correct location and is placed just north of Waterloo Station.

The postcode there is something like SE1 8XR; close but nothing like close enough.

Overall this was two very poor results from Google Maps and if I was relying on them then I would not have got to the meeting.


So I put my instinctive hatred of Microsoft aside and tried multimap instead.

Multimap does not have the clean look of Google Maps but this is because it shows local features, such as schools, which can be useful.

The multimap search for 197 Blackfriars Road did point to a location on the right road but one that is significantly south of the correct location.

This would have been good enough for my purpose (unlike either of the Google Maps results) as this would have taken me to the correct street and I could have used the street numbers from there to find the correct building.

I might have complained more if it had been raining though so perhaps I should not have accepted this near miss as good enough after all.


My final attempt was to do a multimap search by postcode.

This was, for all intents and purposes, spot on.

So both multimap responses were fit for purpose but neither of Google Maps were.

I managed to get to the right answer in the end only because I knew to question the first response that I got and how to check this against other information sources and other search methods. Useful skills when we are all wallowing in digital information where it is all to easy to mistake a quick answer for a correct one.

I'll still use Google Maps but now I'll be even more cautious about what it tells me.

Images of London

Another Stop the War demonstration took me to London on Saturday and I took the opportunity to do some other sightseeing while I was there.

Exiting from the tunnel at South Kensington station I went first to the National History Museum where there was a small exhibition of ice sculptures.

My favourite was this one of three penguins that must have felt right at home in the cold foggy conditions that engulfed London at that time.

It is virtually impossible for me to go anywhere near South Kensington without popping into the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and this was no exception.

After the usual visit to the architecture section I wandered almost aimlessly and found some sections that I am sure that I have not been to before, including an Arts and Crafts section that I would have been to several times before if I knew that it was there (I refuse to use a map of the museum because that would take away some of the mystery).

One of the many things I like about the V&A is the collections of normal household objects of which this lovely period tin is an excellent example.

Walking up Exhibition Road towards Hyde Park takes you past the modern entrance to Imperial College London.

Imperial specialises in science and technology so it is not that surprising to see a Ferrari Formula 1 car in the entrance hall.

Students, like most office workers, do not care who follows them through a badged door so I was easily able to get in to take a shot unhindered by glass and then escape before my unauthorised presence was noticed.

And finally to a frosty Hyde Park for the demonstration for peace in Gaza.

We assembled by Cumberland Gate before heading off west along the evocatively named North Carriage Drive to leave the park at Lancaster Gate.

From there the scenic route took us through some of the smartest streets in London as we travelled along Bayswater Road, down Kensington Church Street and then east along Kensington Road to the Israeli Mission in Old Court Palace.

The march was the usual oxymoron of a harmonious singing crowd brought together by something bad. It was cold miserable day but the spirit of the crowd and the importance of the cause were uplifting. It was a good place to be.

Thinking about conversations

The next Gurteen Knowledge Cafe is about conversations and I have been doing some thinking on the subject ahead of the event. Much of this has been through an exchange of emails with Ray Shaw who is leading the debate at the Knowledge Cafe.

I have tried to capture some of these thoughts as pictures as this is how I like to do my consulting.

This categorisation of dialogues tries to show how conversations differ from other forms of dialogues which includes the extremes of preaching and interrogation. My conjecture is that two factors we need to consider is to what extent a participant in the dialogue has control of the exchange and to what extent the exchange of information is balanced between the participants.

This gives us the four extremes where one person is telling (preaching) or demanding (interrogating) and another person is the recipient, i.e. is being told or interrogated.

I've defined conversation as the square in the middle where there is equilibrium on both the control of the exchange and the direction of the change.

If we accept this definition of a conversation then the next thing to consider is the tools that we can use to make these conversations happen.

This diagram considers "tools" in terms of the degree of interactivity they allow (e.g. blogs allow some feedback via comments but this is limited) and in terms or the richness of content within the exchanges (e.g. Instant Messaging is just text).

I do not think that either of these models is complete and I am not sure yet whether they will prove to have any value, but I am sure that my thinking on conversations will get a boost at the Knowledge Cafe. I'll post an update then.

Update: You can now also read my blog posts on how the Cafe was run and what I learnt from it.

The shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt event*

When it first opened, Liberty was described by Oscar Wilde, a friend of founder Arthur Liberty, as “the chosen resort of the artistic shopper”.

I agree.

My sadly limited collection of Liberty shirts is not getting any younger and some of them are seriously showing signs of years of wear and adoration.

The worn ones get relegated to very casual wear, then to gardening wear and only when devoid of any colour are they reluctantly put in the fabric recycling bank.

So it was time to make another pilgrimage to Liberty, fortuitously coincident with their Winter Sale.

Liberty menswear department has been ringing the changes in recent years as it has moved out of the Regent Street section and moved away from its Gentleman's Outfitters appearance (which I loved) and has adopted the standard modern shop look with lots of space and not many clothes.

Sadly there has also been a move away from the beautiful swathes of traditional Liberty fabric that used to adorn shirts, ties, pyjamas, underwear, and almost every other form of male clothing.

I have never gone as far as underwear but I do have loads of ties, a rugby shirt (the other one died), some polo shirts and more handkerchiefs than any man has a right to own.

I went to Liberty hoping to find three new shirts but not really expecting to be able to do so.

But Liberty came up trumps and I left joyously with three gorgeous new shirts that shout "Liberty" at you from 50m. That's what I call a successful shopping trip.

*No clues where the title comes from, you really should know.

FreakAngels is stunning

As an avid reader of comics and a lover of leading edge technology it is a little odd that I have not done much with online comics before. That is now changing.

I am starting to play with the ClickWheel application on my iPod touch which looks promising but has a limited catalogue of comics available.

I think that the iPod/iPhone is the platform of choice for the future but for the moment the content is mostly aimed at the PC.

One of my Twitter friends pointed me to FreakAngels, a free weekly comic by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield, and I love it!

You could call it a post-apocalyptic story because, er, it takes places after an apocalypse, but that would be to miss the point.

It's a story about a group of 23 year olds who happen to have caused the apocalyptic event and who are now trying to save part of what's left, i.e. London's Whitechapel.


I spoke warmly of Warren Ellis' writing recently and he is an established writer so it is no surprise that the stories are good.

Paul Duffield was not an artist that I knew before but he has quickly impressed. There are 40 episodes of FreakAngels so far, each of 6 pages, and each page is wonderful.

I could have picked any number of pages to show the quality of the artwork but I managed to limit my selection to just three.

The top image is actually the last page of the first arc of the story and shows post-apocalyptic London (OK, so the apocalypse is fairly important to the comic) where a large part of the city is flooded.

This flooding is dramatically shown in the second image of the London Eye, Guildhall and Shell Tower. This is a very recognisable rendition of these London landmarks made suitably bleak by the colouring.

This is simply beautiful artwork and I would look at this even if the story was poor or in a foreign language.

The story makes a lot of being set in London and this adds to the interest to me.

I am not sure what the Whitechapel connection is yet (I need to read the FreakAngels Whitechapel Forum to find out) but I like the fact that the story is set there. I worked around there for a couple of years not that long ago and am familiar with its streets, architecture and atmosphere.

I chose the final picture to show both what Whitechapel looks like and, for those who already knew that, how well the character of the place is captured.

I read all 40 issues of FreakAngels today and am only disappointed that I have to wait until Friday for the next episode.