The Royal Mail have taken legal action against a non profit service, little known outside 'techy' circles called Earnest Marples, shutting it down. You're probably wondering what Earnest Marples is, and why it matters. Well Earnest Marples was a clever little service that did a simple job for lots of other non-profit on-line projects. It allowed other people to send it a postcode, and it would convert that postcode into a lattitude and a longitude, so that it would be easy to plot the postcode on a map and do other things with it.

Now that Earnest Marples has been switched off, a free service called Twitter Plan that we really liked doesn't work anymore. It used to send us a message automatically every time a new planning application in Leith was posted on the City of Edinburgh Council website. Twitter Plan, was a great example of a non-profit service that made it easy for people all over the UK to participate in decision making about their local neighbourhood. It was built by volunteers, and was often a huge improvement on the service provided by local authorities, who in theory, have much greater resources to throw at these things, and should be setting up these services anyway.

Sadly, The City of Edinburgh Council doesn't provide a free local alerts system. So you can't sign up to get an email when a planning application is lodged near you. Now that Twitterplan is down, if you want to know about new planning applications in your area, you'll need to remember to go to the City of Edinburgh Council website every week and check through the 'Weekly List' of planning applications lodged with the council.

Twitter Plan wasn't the only really useful service that relied upon Earnest Marples that had been built by volunteers to improve upon government services. The brilliantly named "Job Centre Pro Plus" used to allow users to get email alerts every time a new local job vacancy was posted to the governments Job Centre Plus website. It's a simple idea, but try going to the government funded Job Centre Plus website and see if you can even get it to give you a simple list of all the jobs available in Leith, and you'll see how useful Job Centre Pro Plus was to people who are unemployed. Well, Job Centre Pro Plus doesn't work now either.

There were other non-profit services using Earnest Marples including ones that were providing live bus timetable information, a 'find your local hospital service' and one that helped people to find their nearest polling station.

So, we hope you'll agree with us, even if you didn't use any of these services, that perhaps it would be a good thing if the Royal Mail would allow non-profit users of post code data to get access to the information they need for free, as this would encourage geeks all over the UK to build all sorts of other socially useful websites.

If you do agree, there's a couple of things that the people behind Earnest Marples would like you to do.

Firstly, you could use another non-profit website that makes it easy to work out who your local MP is called WriteToThem.com, and you could use it to write to them to ask them to support Early Day Motion number 2000, that calls on the Royal Mail to provide a free license of the Postcode Address File for non-profit uses.

Secondly, you could also sign the petition that's been started on the number 10 website. You can find it by clicking here. And lest you think this all a bit obscure, and that no-one really cares, you might be interested to know that more than 2200 people have signed the petition since it was started, just a few weeks ago.

More information on the Earnerst Marples blog.