This past month the snow has caused one hell of a lot of disruption. People missing work, parcels not delivered, meetings cancelled and even worse. If you’re like me, you have probably given sites like BBC Weather, the Met Office or Metcheck. You may also have asked why they under or over-estimated the power of the snowfall.
All of these sites offer predictions about how the weather may pan out and can never be 100% accurate. So, what if you could harness the power of thousands of people across the UK? Well, Ben Marsh has come up with a novel way of giving people real-time ‘snow observations’. His website http://uksnowmap.com/ pulls data from thousands of tweets and displays, in real-time, snowfall across the UK. This site pulls together all tweets with the hastag #uksnow and extracts people’s postcodes and people’s snow rating. If people have uploaded images to 3rd party apps like Twitpic or YFrog, these images will be displayed on a panel on this site. Once this is done, the uksnowmap shows in what areas snow has fallen across the UK.
Admittedly, this app requires people to interpret snow rating themselves. However, it does show how that harnessing data from thousands of people and creating a mashup can result in great apps.
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