Snow joke

Completely agree with this post by Pete Ashton. It’s a pet hobby-horse of mine (one of many!). Comparing the way the UK copes with severe weather with what happens in cold places is completely daft – those places know it’s going to be cold 50% of the time, and build a transport infrastructure in anticipation.

In the UK we get snow like we’re seeing now once every 10 years or so – the additional cost involved for us to provide 100% reliability through such a rare event would be enormous, and no taxpayer or fare-payer would stomach it for a moment.

Crowdsourced snow reports on Twitter

Twitter is proving fascinating for yet another unexpected application this evening. Along with many other people, I’m sat glued to the snow reports coming in from around the country, using the hashtag #uksnow. The topic is vying for top slot on the ‘trending topics’ list with the Superbowl – quite some achievement!

Many contributors are using a standard format, which should, if anyone’s so inclined, make it dead easy to extract the feed and drive a map mashup. Realtime weather status via Twitter – brilliant.

Why not join in? http://twurl.nl/d27uvr to follow the #uksnow tweets on Twitterfall.

Update: The map mashup has materialised here. Huge props to @benmarsh.