If you'd like to show your support for public services and basic morality, here's where you could spend your money. Instead of - just to name some companies at random - Starbucks and Amazon. I've tried to avoid using Google at every stage of making this too. Just saying. (It's called active citizenship, Eric).

Since it's crowd-sourced information, if you wanted to suggest the names and locations of a few of your favourite independent bookshops and cafes, I'd be your best mate forever.

1. I've prioritised book shops and cafes. This is because of the obvious focus there's been on Starbucks, Amazon, Costa et al. I'll try to add all indie shops as time goes on, but there's nothing stopping you from doing so now, of course...

I'm going to manually approve all the reports as a quality check, so bear with me.

2. What counts as "indie" is an interesting question, and perhaps in the course of making this map it can be discussed. 

Locally, here in the glorious People's Republic of Lewes, Bill's has sold itself partly on the basis of "localism" branding but it seems to be spreading across the country like a gentrified pox. I also happen to know they treat some of their workers quite badly, so I've left them off. Maybe that's capricious and unfair of me, I'm not sure. (Bet they'll spit in my guava and coffee smoothie next time I'm in there, now, but since I haven't set foot in a Bill's since 2008 and have no intention of going back, it hardly matters).

One perfectly sensible argument would be to switch chains: don't go to Starbucks, go to Costa or Pret instead. 

However, I'm not buying this. As Dan Trilling has argued convincingly, the scope of UKUncut's campaign boycotting tax dodgers is too limiting. 

"By not considering capitalism as a system it fails to understand why companies attempt to avoid tax. It is not simply because they are evil. It is because the system requires as much in order for companies to operate especially as markets become saturated and profits begin to fall." 

Starbucks, Amazon, Google avoid tax because - by law - they're impelled to. They have to drive down costs and maximise profits, to increase "shareholder value" (though - as with the shadow banking system - the immediate beneficiaries of sweetheart deals with tax authorities are more likely to be executives operating companies than stock holders). 

So it's no surprise, then, that Pret recently fired and smeared a longstanding employee who had the temerity to try to organise a union - PAMSU - demanding the London Living Wage of £8.55 for its 91% immigrant workforce. 

Or that Costa is moving into Totnes in the face of stiff opposition from the Transition Town crowd. 

I live in Lewes - which may as well be twinned with Totnes - and I have a lot of problems with the insufferably middle-class demographic pushing for local currencies and slow food. 

We cannot create little folkie bubbles of uniqueness and hope they can withstand the diastrophic forces of corporate capitalism. F Scott Fitzgerald was right, the 1% are different: they have more money. But on this, the hippies are right. (Not that anyone complained about Costa and Cafe Nero setting up on Lewes High Street, to my knowledge...)

Speaking of corporate capture, NEF have written some good reports on chain store's impacts on local economies with some interesting data in them. Like all NEF reports, they got Andrew Simms on the 'Today' programme then not much happened...

3. And speaking of local content, the data from this map is published under a Non Commercial Creative Commons License, and can be downloaded as a cvs and kml file. I've used the Ushahidi CrowdMap thingamajig because - while the user interface is clumsy and the User Guides opaque - it's not owned by a giant shitbag corporation, yet. This would all be a doddle on Google, but there's an obvious paradox in using Google data to boycott... Google.

4. No, this isn't anything to do with UKUncut, NEF, Occupy this and that, or the Tax Payer's Alliance. It's been put together by me, Doc Odin aka Tim Concannon. Although I've written things to do with various protests movements of late, and agree with some of the things said and done in their name, I'm not involved in running any of them. This is including because they can often be quite silly.

Though, arguably, not as silly as trying to make a map of loads of independent cafes and bookshops in the UK.

This map and appended data is (c) Tim Concannon, 2012. Published under a Non Commercial Creative Commons License. 

By submitting data for approval you agree to this attribution. I actively encourage you to copy, distribute, remix and transmit the work for non commercial purposes. 

The first person to turn the map into icing on a cake wins a big cake.