[LINK] New alerting service and apps for council development applications

[Chris Maltby]

Here's an interesting new community project - planningalerts.org.au
The basic application is an email alert about development proposals
near a specified address. But there's a lot of tie-in with graphical
display apps.  <http://planningalerts.org.au/>

Here's the blurb from Layar.com who have an iPhone or Android app for
visualising the data that comes from these kinds of feed.
  <http://www.layar.com/layers/planningalertsaustralia>

  You'd probably know if your next door neighbour was going to knock
  their house down. But you might never find out if the old cinema or
  pub 5 streets away is going to be converted into luxury flats until
  the bulldozers turned up.

  PlanningAlerts.org.au is a free service which searches as many
  planning authority websites as it can find and shows you details of
  applications near you.

  The aim of this to enable shared scrutiny of what is being built (and
  knocked down) in peoples' communities.

  You can also get new development applications delivered to your inbox
  by signing up for email alerts.

  This layer was developed by Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska
  from the OpenAustralia Foundation. The design, ideas, drive and
  inspiration courtesy of the ever fabulous Rob Manson and Alex Young of
  MOB Labs.

  The OpenAustralia Foundation is an innovative Australian charity that
  finds better ways of bringing useful information to you.

Something I didn't know before was that Google maps can also take an RSS
feed URL as a search query and give you a tagged map for the addresses in
the feed items. This one shows all the applications in Waverley Council:
  <http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=http:%2F%2Fwww.planningalerts.org.au%2Fauthorities%2Fwaverley%2Fapplications.rss>

They get the data by scraping local government authority websites and
they take donations of code or cash to add new local government areas.

Chris