Berkeley Bike Boulevards from Streetfilms shows some ideas about encouraging bicycle use in Berkeley, California.

Mountbrook: A Vision For Ballsbridge is the video about the urban development planned for Ballsbridge, which is about 10 minutes walk from where I live. There are also some nice pictures of the proposed development.
It’s interesting to look at the way the project is presented and the way that people are reacting to it.

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This is a fairly usable, simple map of Dublin bus routes. It’s great, probably the best bus map out there for Dublin. Mind you, you couldn’t rely on it alone, because it doesn’t link to the timetables, so you have no idea how often each route operates, which is essential to know if you want to make a connection.

Government Minister to delay Irish postcode system. Not such a big surprise. The plan had been to launch a scheme by January 2008, but the project appears to have become mired.
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Stamen design writes about a proposal for visualising schedule information at the Transbay Tower in San Francisco. I read about it on Smartmobs and they read about it on Information Aesthetics.
It looks nice, but a bit incoherent if you ask me. I was thinking more about how plane departures could be shown on a screen. The ideas I had were as follows:

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There is an article in today’s Irish Times about OOXML in which I am quoted. I was asked for a comment on this in the afternoon yesterday. A number of people have asked me about the position I took this morning. Basically, the slightly longer story is that the reason we are abstaining is because there was not a large enough majority in favour of voting for conditional approval (there was a simple majority, but not the two thirds majority we had agreed would be required). The other people voting wanted to express approval without any reservations whatsoever.

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I went and bought myself a bike to get around Dublin on. I have to say, it’s definitely the best way to get around the city centre during the traffic.

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Last January, the Department of Communications told me that it had done an extensive evaluation and decided that making people register their prepay mobile phones was a bad idea. Now the government (not so much the Department of Communications but Pat Carey, a junior minister with responsibility for drugs announced that this was ready to go ahead, in accordance with the program for government.
Now, the Department of Communications is going to investigate this again:

Minister Ryan will be discussing the question of mobile phone registration with Minister of State Carey in the coming weeks. Both Departments are conscious of the complex legal, technical and data-protection issues that surround this commitment in the Programme for Government.

The Department of Communications, in conjunction with the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs will be reviewing the situation, seeking advice from the Attorney General and working to resolve them insofar as practicable.

The Government is looking at all options that can assist in the fight against illicit drugs.”

In other words, the Department is going to evaluate this idea again and then decide once again not to do it. I don’t know why these people bother making decisions at all if they are going to instantly forget about why they made them.

I wonder why the government put this policy in the program for government. It was just looking for trouble.

The winners of the VoteTube contest have been announced. VoteTube, set up by Simon McGarr and I (although Simon did most of the work) brought together videos from all political hues for the Irish general election. Congratulations to everyone who sent in an entry.

Really what we want to do now though, is to get people at the ‘grass roots’ to make videos about stuff that matters to them. Any ideas on how to do this would be great.