Brixton (UK) - how to find new building sites (and old ones being demolished)

(post by Robert de Heer)
Planningalerts.com - I guess all of us had had the same experience: suddenly, you see in your neighbourhood a new construction being built, or an old one being demolished. Richard Pope had the same experience with an old pub in his town Brixton. He was mad, and decided to do something about it. In many countries, one needs a planning application from local government to build or demolish a place. Officially, these permits are published in local newspapers or on government websites. But they are difficult to find or to browse.
So Richard built Planningalerts.com: a website that crawls over 150 local UK-government websites looking for new planning applications, and reformats them in a simple to use geoRSS-feed. Anyone can use this data to make Google Maps-mashups, or e-mail alert services based on your neighbourhood.
A very cool and helpful example of what one can do with local content & Google Maps! Which country is next?