Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Free the postcode

It seems quite ridiculous that if you want to find out how UK postcodes relate to their geographic location you have to pay the Post Office for the privilege. Of course it's possible to pull this data out of Streetmap via a bit of screen-scraping (like I've done with my partial list of London postcodes) but this is almost certainly breaking copyright, although the Post Office haven't chased after me yet...

Anyway, it would appear there is a group of people trying to rectify this situation by getting everybody with a GPS device to find the location of any postcode area they happen to be in. I hope it works out for them, although it's insane that it's necessary.

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