ReadWriteWeb

Smart electrical grids that deliver energy consumption data from the home to a utility company, through software for analysis and back to consumers at home again, are believed to be a new frontier in environmental responsibility, effective public planning and tech innovation.

Green tech writer, Katie Fehrenbacher, has written an important article arguing that utility companies don't get it, are afraid of the costs, and are thus unlikely to offer the kind of "real time" data delivery that could serve as a foundation for eye-opening innovation like we've seen from the networked world of the Internet.

"So that government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee who led the creation of the world wide web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming month." Can't you picture Barack Obama making that statement? He didn't though; that was the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a statement about electoral reform, according to a report from Charles Arthur of the Guardian.

Berners-Lee, a man whose invention of the web has had a greater impact on humanity than all but a handful of inventions over the last 50 years, is now one of the world's leading advocates not just for government data on the web but for free public access to raw bulk data that anyone can process for analysis and mashups. While the new Obama administration has made big promises about open government, it may now quickly find itself falling behind the UK.

Three weeks ago Google demonstrated a new product in Labs called Google Squared; it's a search engine that creates structured data from big piles of information and lets users compare various things by their attributes. There have been suggestions that Google Squared will crush Wolfram Alpha. Well, Google Squared went live today and while it's a great idea, in reality the service doesn't look very useful. It doesn't look like it's going to crush anyone.

The user interface is inflexible, the data is odd looking and it's hard to imagine using Squared regularly. It's a great idea but we'll see where it goes.

StatPlot is the newest project of sports statistic aggregator StatSheet and you're likely to enjoy it whether you're a sports fan or not. The site makes it easy to assemble attractive, dynamic charts for sports statistics in minutes. Navigate through the long list of options by point and click, autocomplete, cut and paste and you're done. Loads of data is already there and available for your use at no charge.

It's a fun site to use. Basketball, football and NASCAR are supported initially - hopefully baseball and hockey will be next. There's OpenID integration, the image selection is really nice and it's just great. It's still a little rough around the edges but given that the service just launched today - we're impressed. This is the kind of democratized data visualization that any field could benefit from with enough open data and a good user interface.

It's a little bit scary, but widget and sharing service ClearSpring said this morning that the company's media widgets and newly acquired AddThis plug-in are now seen by more than 500 million unique viewers each month, according to Comscore. That's half the people on the internet, the company says.

That's a whole lot of information. ClearSpring sees not just what you're sharing, but nearly everything you're doing on the pages its products are on. (AddThis is on ReadWriteWeb, for example.) So what on earth is it going to do with all that data? Like they said in Spiderman, "with great power, comes great responsibility." We asked ClearSpring's CEO about these super hero-like responsibilities and his thoughts are below. You can decide for yourself whether he can be trusted, but the work the company is doing is very cool.

Air pollution is one of the number one factors that affect our quality of life and health. Currently, pollutants are measured at different stations in a city and that data is aggregated to a single number (the air quality index) and published once a day on a website. There is not enough data that gets gathered to evaluate air quality in a given neighborhood and that data is hard to find. Now a European company called Sensaris is using Bluetooth wireless sensors, used in combination with mobile phones, that allow citizens to monitor and report air and sound quality data. Its first large scale deployment is in Paris.

Can being "present in the now" be packaged and sold as a service? A number of companies believe that it can be and are aiming to offer a "real-time" layer of functionality to consumer websites and businesses interested in this growing trend online.

On one hand it's just a speed up the infrastructure play, but the impact of real time information delivery on a user's experience of a website can be profound. The latest entrant into this market of white label real time service layers is called Notify.me.

A little startup called Bit.ly has unseated TinyURL as the default link shortening service on Twitter. This isn't just about shortening links, though. "The truth about Bit.ly," enterprise software analyst James Governor said today, "is that it's not a URL shortener, it's a trend management and metrics platform."

The key idea behind the Web is that pages are connected through hypertext links. Google changed the world and made money beyond anyone's wildest dreams by analyzing those connections between pages. It was a simple proposition, at its core: the more a page is linked to, the more authoritative it is. The web isn't just pages anymore, though. Now the web also includes people as a fundamental factor to take into consideration.

Today is an important day in the history of politics and technology - the US Senate voting record is finally available in machine-readable XML (extensible markup language) format. Mashups, vote tracking and comparison applications, will now be welcomed in the front door of Congress as first class technologies.

On May 1st South Carolina's Senator, Jim DeMint, officially asked the Senate Rules Committee to make the data available and just four days later the feed is here. Not everyone is happy about about the information being made publicly available like this, however.

Google announced today the launch of a new site, Google Code Labs, where developers can find links to all the major code projects that Google staff is working on. It's a central place to find APIs that 3rd parties can build off of and it includes a clarification of what projects Google has made a long term commitment to and what they have not. We were a little surprised to see what the company considers "graduated" from Labs and what's still there.

Perhaps nothing like this should be a surprise coming from a company that built the leading webmail product online and still calls it Beta five years later.