Gareth Shapiro London Based Flex/AS3 Freelance Web Developer

A recent trend within the UK government is one of providing access to the data sets they hold to the public. It appears to me at least that the thinking behind this is that transparency is promoted, the public may well come up with ways of using the data that are useful to everyone, and after all the public has paid for the creation of these data sets and so it seems correct that they should have access to it.

Not too long ago I attended a meeting at London's amazing city hall which focused on the Greater London Authority's contribution to this movement, The London Datastore. For someone like myself who develops compelling rich interactive digital media for a living it was obvious that here is a rich source of potential to tell a story using this data and Flash / Flex.

Booz and Company are an international business management firm with clients and consultants stationed around the globe. A large part of what they do is develop, collate and distribute business expertise. Digital media has obvious benefits over traditional distribution models for content such as this and the rich interactive experience made possible using Flash enhances the impact and enjoyment of the ideas and messages for everyone who experience them.

You did read correctly. That does say "Hack" and "The Government" in one sentence.

People often misuse the word hack. It originally meant "to solve problem" and a group of developers, designers and statisticians got together in London over the weekend to solve the "What cool things can you build with publicly accessible government data?" question.

Being a Flash and Flex programmer naturally I thought it might be good idea to do an interactive data visualisation of some sort.

If you live in the UK and you buy a new or used Nissan you get access to the Nissan After Sales website. This site allows Nissan car owners to register their vehicles with their local dealer, book a service and stay in touch with Nissan after purchase. The bulk of the functionality is delivered via a Flex Application which is powered by a Sales Force back end.

Like many companies BlackBerry have undertaken sophisticated analysis of the types of people that buy their products and also identified some that don't yet but are likely candidates for the future. This is of course invaluable information to those responsible for developing marketing campaigns and strategies. It is the way that BlackBerry has gone about distributing the information internally that is different.

Isn't it great when digital work lasts longer than 5 min? I recently updated a piece I did exactly a year ago for The Economist's annual World In project.

Underwired are a London based ECRM strategy and execution agency.

Recently they produced their first Flash site but being specialists in digital relationship marketing, retention and email marketing and not Actionscript, it was not running as well as it should. I restructured their site so that it would load quickly while maintaining the clever HTML/Javascript/PHP code they had written to maintain some search engine readable HTML on each page.

Christmas seems to come around so quickly. One minute you are enjoying long summer days in the park and the next thing you know you are building Flash based shopping cart applications for Christmas promotions. Where does the time go?

The first part of this week was spent in Brighton attending the 2009 edition of Flash on the Beach. I had heard good things about it and I was not disappointed. I have come away feeling injected with inspiration, something that had been replaced by fatigue after some demanding deadlines recently. This is filed under 'Work'. I am not sure it should be, it was way too much fun.

If you have been following the posts on this blog you will know about a ”proof of concept” prototype I built for The Economist earlier in the year. This post is about the refinement of that work into online interactive content now published on The Economist website.