ernest marples take down
As you've probably already heard, Ernest Marples, the postcode to location lookup service, has been legally served with what's effectively a demand for an innovation tax, and the functionality of a load of sites have stopped working.
JobCentreProPlus wont be searchable until that gets sorted out. But that's not the biggest problem when pieces of online infrasructure go away. The bits that keep workng behind the scenes, also aren't. Job data is transient - sometimes jobs are only posted for a day or two until they're filled.
And if the innovation tax demand takes longer than that to be sorted out, then some of the statistics that we generate, how many jobs, in which areas, and when, start to become useless, and the site suffers not just for users today, but for the future.
When we (have the time to) draw a heat map of where jobs are, and put that next to the unemployment heat map, there'll be a gap of however long, right around what's said to be the turning point of the recovery. [If anyone wants to draw those maps, drop me an email for the data in an easier form than our API]
3 Comments:
You might want to try http://developers.cloudmade.com/wiki/geocoding-http-api/Find_by_postcode which doesn't use Royal Mail data. Instead it uses FreeThePostcode, NPE Maps and OpenStreetMap data, which doesn't have the Royal Mail restrictions. However there is much lower coverage, however maybe an interim solution until the licensing is sorted out.
http://bit.ly/kl2f9
Recreation of Ernest Marples, as MyMarples. Any problems give me a tweet @ivebeenlinuxed
http://bit.ly/kl2f9 sorry!
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