ReadWriteWeb

The UK government has published 5 years of nation-wide road safety and casualty data freely online on a map that anyone can view in a web browser. It's a remarkable instance of data-driven public accountability; presumably citizens will use this newly accessible data to apply pressure on government agencies regarding safety improvements. Citizens and researchers will also be able to cross-reference the location of troubled roadways with race and class demographic analysis to illuminate any inequitable allocation of infrastructure resources. It's a bold and enabling action to take online.

The statistics were gathered by independent researchers and put online using eSpatial OnDemand GIS and Open Street Map. Open Street Map is like the Wikipedia of world and local maps, but it's also a popular data platform that many other applications make use of. Map nerds should watch the OpenStreetMap annual conference, State of the Map, for more exciting map and geodata news. The conference opened this morning in Denver, Colorado.

Our original WikiLeaks timeline, including every story we had written about the organization, spanned a period of almost three years, from February 18, 2008 to December 29, 2010. It listed almost 70 posts.

The WikiLeaks story has yet to end, despite the fact that some have theorized it soon will. So here is a second part to the timeline, covering all the stories from December 30 of last year down to the present.

With mobile tech, Siemens helps torture a new generation, this time in Bahrain. Siemens was instrumental in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there as they murdered millions of Jews, along with Gypsies, trade unionists, leftists, homosexuals and others. Serving as one of its engines of genocide, Siemens provided the German Reich with, among other things, slave labor factories located next to concentration camps. Apparently, Siemens thinks that it has been good enough for long enough and that this Internet thing has made a sense of history a thing of the past.

Bloomberg reports that Siemens AG and its joint venture, Nokia Siemens Networks, has made it possible for Bahraini secret police to intercept and generate transcripts of text messages and other mobile communications made by protesters in that country's troubled version of the Arab Spring.

Campaign for imprisoned Syrian blogger. Anyone who still believes that imprisonment and torture of social media users is limited to political radicals and gadfly journalists need look no further than Syria's Anas Maarawi to be disabused of that notion. Maarawi was arrested on July 1. Talk about geek like me. Maarawi started Ardroid, the first Arabic language blog devoted to Google's Android OS.

His supporters have started a Facebook page to publicize his situation. A blog, Free Anas, has also been started, as well as a hashtag, #freeanas. Get on it, nerdlingers.

Experian Hitwise reports that YouTube just had its biggest month of traffic ever in the UK. In July, YouTube accounted for 1 in every 35 UK Internet visits, period. The boom in traffic is due to massive growth in mobile viewing.

Since January, mobile visits to YouTube have doubled in the UK. Hitwise estimates that smartphones and tablets account for as much as 10% of UK YouTube views. Across platforms, YouTube received 22.5% of UK visits to social networks, placing second after Facebook, which received more than half.

The UK government's Office of National Statistics has reported to the public for the first time today about its mandated new measurement of national happiness and well-being. The office has already surveyed 20,000 people on four different emotional and existential questions, such as "to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?" Is this an absurd waste of tax dollars, or an important new frontier for quantitative research?

Why is this of interest to us at ReadWriteWeb? Because the UK's commitment to open data platforms implies to me that this kind of data will someday be available programmatically for analysis, pattern detection, alert monitoring and cross-referencing with other data sets, thus enabling new acts of creativity, self-awareness and innovation. (Or creepy, authoritarian psychographic monitoring and strategic buy-offs when citizens' anger flares ups in a hamlet.) What data could be more important as a platform than data about meaning in the human experience? That's presuming that the quantification of such qualitative matters is possible and can be well executed. It's a type of project that a growing number of governments around the world are undertaking.

Venezuela makes online speech a minefield. Since the time of the Romans, the transition from republic to one-man rule has always been eased with the co-option of laws.

On December 20, the Hugo Chávez-controlled Venezuelan congress passed, and he signed, a law that devolves all power over online content to the executive. The congress coming in soon is much less agreeable to Chávez, hence the speed at which this was hurried through.

When Phoenix-based designer Jamie Martin's blog post hit the front page of Hacker News earlier today, he realized what it's like to burn bridges in a connected world. After his company Status.ly and three other startups were dropped from the Bootup Labs program roster due to financial difficulty, Martin blogged about the unfortunate incident and put his site up for auction. While Martin at first claimed that Bootup Labs "had no money", incubator cofounder Danny Robinson fired back with a reply.

Tom Watson, the digitally literate British parliamentarian and Labour PPC for the West Bromwich East Constituency, has established a series of "digital pledges" in the wake of the Digital Economy Bill in the United Kingdom.

Watson was one of the primary opponents of the bill, which makes it possible for the British government to put the kibosh on pesky websites under the guise of copyright infringements.

The House of Commons passed a controversial piece of legislation called the "Digital Economy Bill." The loudly-criticized law nontheless passed 187-47, according to the Guardian newspaper.

The bill purports to provide comprehensive regulation of digital services, in order to clear the way to promoting Britian as a digital econmic power. Criticism focused first on a clause that would have given broad government discretion to the closing of sites. That clause was removed, but the amendment to another was still significantly worrying to some.