The Isle of Man recently featured in the “map of the week” at OpenStreetMap.

Thanks to the the Department for Local Government & the Environment and some hard work by Nick Black and Dan Karran, amongst others, we’ve got a fairly complete open street map. Great!

It still needs a bit of work, if any locals would like to help?

One of my photographs has been used by design agency the fifth kingdom for the latest set of adverts pushing the Isle of Man .im domain. Which is nice… Apparently Domicilium’s presentation at the last domain conference went down a treat as no-one else had bothered to pay much attention to advertising or branding, and as a result the T5K’s design skills shone though even more. Speaking of the .im domain, the effective opening up of the market for second-level .im domains has been a long time coming — previously it was limited third-levels such as example.co.im and it cost an excessive £100GBP or so — but now that it’s opened up it’s the usual land-grab and wild domain speculation.

Each domain is £40 to register, with two letter domains for £495 and one letters for £995. (All ex. VAT.)

Companies selling instant messengers are the most likely to be interested, though they’ll have to deal with the usual squatters and with arbitration happening in the Isle of Man, the world’s oldest continuously running parliament with its own laws and therefore courts, legal matters may be a little trickier and costlier to pursue.

I do wish they’d sort themselves out a proper whois server, though, web-only lookup is just odd…

Isle of Man Bank Holidays (iCal)

Isle of Man Bank Holidays (Web access via Google Calendar)

This should work with any calendar program that supports the iCal format, such Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal or Mozilla Lightning for Thunderbird, or online services such as Google Calendar. The dates are courtesy of the Official Bank Holidays page of the Isle of Man Treasury.

The Order of Tynwald is here:

• Official Bank Holidays Order (2011) for 2012

I’ll continue updating this calendar yearly as & when the Treasury release the new dates.

• Updated: 2011-07-07 (updated with 2012 dates)
• Updated: 2010-12-14 (updated with Royal Wedding date)
• Updated: 2010-07-26 (updated with 2011 dates)
• Updated: 2009-07-16 (updated with 2010 dates)
• Updated: 2008-04-16 (Migrated to Google Calendar for improved functionality & updated with 2009 dates)
• Updated: 2007-06-22 (Updated with 2008 dates)
• Updated: 2007-03-05 (Updated with 2007 dates, sorry for the delay!)