July 31st, 2010 | by Derek | published in Data
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 [...]
June 27th, 2010 | by Derek | published in Data, Fed Data
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 [...]
December 25th, 2009 | by Derek | published in Data
Readers aren’t dumb; they want to know what we know, and they know that the web makes it possible for us to share with them at a national and even local level. The level of commitment and effort that we put into responding to their need for relevant and meaningful information will go a long way towards building a better relationship with them.
July 15th, 2009 | by Derek | published in Data, IRE
The folks at Sunlight today announced an effort to build a catalog for national and state datasets, going beyond what Data.gov is doing at the federal level. It’s a worthy effort, and as Clay Johnson notes in the blog post, they’re inviting participation because they are definitely going to need the help. I say that [...]
April 11th, 2008 | by Derek | published in Data, Sports, django
Update: a bug in the search form pointed out by Joe Weiss has been fixed. Thanks, Joe! I’ve written before about the applicability of database work to sports, particularly local college and professional teams, and there are signs out there that some news organizations are tackling this previously under-served area. With the NFL draft fast [...]