I used both a trial version of Caspio, and my own custom database and interface, for my still-under-development Ultimate Sacrifice database gallery. Although Caspio allowed me to quickly publish something online, it did not allow me to really learn anything more about database programming. Yes it’s very time-consuming to build my own homegrown application (because I’m still so new at it), but I am gaining such a great understanding of database and web development — which will make future projects fly more quickly.

What? We can’t do that in an era of diminishing resources?

Hmm. When TV got big in the ’60s, we hired TV critics. When business news became important in the ’80s, we ponied up for larger (and better trained) business staffs.

No insults intended to any past or current colleagues – but the utility of most local TV, book and movie critics is gone (unless they’re named “Ebert.”) Travel editors? “National” sports-beat writers who don’t cover the local team anymore? Same story, however sad it may be.

Yes, diminished resources are real – but there are still many, many jobs in our newsrooms whose original purpose has been overwhelmed by the digital revolution.

Bosses, that’s where you get the FTEs to hire your coders.

Moreover, I speak from experience of having tried Caspio.

I have nothing against Caspio. But I am strongly against outsourcing.

Just as staff produced content distinguishes your news organizations from wire content, you can do much, much, much more with online data DIY then using a template tool.

A template tool allows you to provide simple look-ups. But your users will expect more — they’ll want to rank, sort, link results to other databases, etc.

In other words, if you know how to do it yourself, you can bring a degree of intelligence to the project that you just can’t get with simple look-ups built by a template.

So to me, if online databases are worth doing — and they are, and we’re competing with non-journalism sites already in this field — news organizations need to commit to a database platform and commit to training somebody who can build a bridge betweeen databases and all the other content.

For example, do a google advanced search on washingtonpost.com for “Payne Memorial AME Church.” You’ll find the John Edwards event. If you do a search for “wallsmith” filtering just on “site: nytimes.com,” you will not find his entry in our Flash graphic, Faces of the Dead.

I think if you take advantage of client-side technologies (AJAX, Flash), I do think search engines have more trouble. This is the complaint I have heard from our online guys, and that might explain why Caspio sites don’t rank higher in Google. That’s just a guess though, because I have no idea how they do data. I will also admit right up front (or almost up front) that I am no expert in this regard, and may be 100 percent wrong.

OK, now to my real point:

To add to what Derek said, there’s a bigger downside I see to outsourcing your database-driven content (for those who have the choice): You’re also outsourcing the process of discovery as well.

I remember when I learned Arc, suddenly I was thinking about data in an entirely new way. Stories occurred to me that never would have otherwise. Same deal with Perl. Once I learned to script, and then scrape the web, all kinds of projects occurred to me that I couldn’t have imagined before.

Sarah always says, “Give someone a hammer, the world looks like nothing but nails.” (Or something like that…) By outsourcing, you’re giving Caspio the hammer. Personally? I want that hammer.

So, we can talk about whether or not you could have done PolitiFact in Caspio or not, and whether it would have cost more or less money to the organization. But that’s missing the point. The point is, without learning Python and Django, would PolitiFact even have occurred to Matt? Maybe, maybe not.

I have to disagree with you there. We use lots of dynamic data in several apps at washingtonpost.com, and Google and other search engines index them just fine. It’s not the dynamic nature of data per se, it’s how you handle it within a Web page that matters. I’m not saying that search engines won’t eventually learn how to deal with content loaded from JavaScript calls, but right now those kinds of pages don’t seem to be getting indexed.

http://www.jacobian.org/writing/2007/sep/12/db-journalism/