Clay Johnson, late of Sunlight Labs and now writing at the splendidly-named InfoVegan, says that what the “Open Data” movement needs is a better way to store data on the Web. Something like a GitHub for data: Why can I not type into a console gitdata install census-2010 or gitdata install census-2010 —format=mongodb and have [...]
As nice as it is to get praised for the civic-mindedness of your work, the not-so-secret secret about APIs at The Times is that we’re the biggest consumer of them. The flexibility and convenience that the APIs provide make it easier to cut down on repetitive manual work and bring new ideas to fruition. Other [...]
From the perspective of someone who uses government data pretty often, Data.gov and its state progeny (Massachusetts, D.C., Minnesota – the “data deli” is a great name – among them) are better than what we used to have. They make the acquisition of data by journalists, regulated communities and the general public much easier than [...]
It’s true that Excel has been a decreasing part of my toolkit for several years now, and that I never quite had the love for it that I do for various database managers. But I’m guessing that’s the exception, not the rule, in the broader journalism community. So when it came time to propose a [...]
It’s dangerous to blog late at night, so take what follows with a grain of salt. It’s more stream of (semi-)consciousness than anything else, but I’m curious what other folks think. Note: I wrote this before Aron’s thread about conferences on Hacks/Hackers, but some of it relates to that question, too. Give IRE a lot [...]
