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Last month at SXSW, Infochimps, the self-described "Amazon of data," unveiled thousands of new API calls. The API calls, or plug-and-play bits of code that developers can insert into their applications, were released in hopes of soothing the headaches inherent in making data-dependent applications.

This weekend, a few developers took three headache-free days to make three awesome Twitter apps built on the Infochimps API calls.

Check 'em out.

Data.gov is a recent example of our ability to gather, store and analyze enormous, unprecedented quantities of information. Projects like these have the power to change our lives by driving transparency, accountability and collaboration. Data.gov is a testament to the times we live in and what we can do with big data technologies. But, perhaps more importantly, it is a testament to the big data community and the talented people behind the data who are dedicated to making it meaningful to the rest of us. It's time to bring these folks out of the shadows.

A bipartisan bill limiting what companies can do with online user activity and profile data may be introduced tomorrow by Senators John McCain and John Kerry, according to reporting first in the Wall St. Journal and then today on marketing news site Clickz. The Journal's Julia Angwin, citing anonymous sources, reports that the bill will require that sharing of user data between companies be opted-into by users and that users be able to see what data about them is being shared.

That might not sound so bad on the surface, but in a new world of fast-developing technology - it's good to think hard before making laws based on what might seem like common sense. The internet is a young thing and legislation like this could cut deep. Leadership on the issue from John McCain, who less than 3 years ago thought it appropriate to run for the Presidency without ever having used the internet before, seems particularly inappropriate. This is an issue that needs to be looked at from a pro-technology perspective, at least in part.

The US Department of Justice appears to have made a deal with Google that would allow it to acquire ITA Software, a company that provides airline data to travel search engines, for $700 million with a list of conditions.

One of my favorite websites in the world is now in Google's hands. Built as a side-project by ITA engineers, Needlebase is a point-and-click data extraction tool that recommends merges and allows for data to be visualized in multiple ways including as maps. I am not a technology blogger because I am moved by news that air travelers may have to pay a few hundred dollars more per year. I'm moved by technology that puts formerly inaccessible skills into the hands of everyday people to create beautiful things, like Needlebase. Needlebase is the WordPress or YouTube of data extraction and manipulation and if Google kills it I'm going to be very upset.

Data is big. By that, we mean that there's not only a lot of data, but handling all that data is a problem that everyone from small businesses on up to the big boys, like Google and Facebook, has to tackle in one way or another.

To help with the problem of handling Big Data, Dealmaker Media has announced a group of startups that it says are "providing answers to all your database problems in unique and innovative ways."

The Web is awash in "exchange data" - from apartment listings on Craigslist to job listings on LinkedIn, Monster and Twitter. There are handcrafted goods on Etsy and real estate offerings on Zillow. But each site offers its own method for hosting similar data, with the end user left to visit each site to access it. For developers, the data is often held captive and inaccessible. Greg Kidd, founder and CEO of 3taps, argues that this data "should be available to the public" and is launching a "Data Commons" to do just that.

3taps is launching today at the Data 2.0 conference in San Francisco, offering a platform for collecting a distributing exchange data, in an attempt to "democratize the exchange space."

Two years ago the incoming Obama administration launched a number of ambitious websites, most notably Data.gov, that were dedicated to offering public and government data to the outside world. The stated intention was to foster transparency and offer a platform for the development of new software and services. It appears those experiments may be over for now.

Today the Sunlight Foundation and Federal News Radio reported that the public projects Data.gov, USASpending.gov, Apps.gov/now, IT Dashboard and paymentaccuracy.gov as well as a number of internal government sites including Performance.gov, FedSpace and many of the efforts related the FEDRamp cloud computing cybersecurity effort would be taken offline in coming weeks due to budget cuts by Congress. Perhaps things like electronic government, software platforms and public accountability were just fads, anyway.

Update:. We're hearing from several places that there's a potentially viable effort to save these sites and organizations. Here is one perspective on that and you can also see the Sunlight Foundation's Save the Data petition. See also Alex Howard's in-depth reporting on this news published on Friday.

• What's the most effective way to spread false political rumors? Not blogs. Not Twitter. Email. http://bit.ly/e674zt via @millermccune
• GoDaddy.com CEO kills elephant, poses with carcass, is "not ashamed". Outrage ensues. http://lat.ms/dOPADN via @latimesoutposts
• The worst jobs in the world matrix. Yep, World of Warcraft gold farmer makes the list: http://bit.ly/fSrskX via @LaphamsQuart
• The iPad isn't a product, it's a badge - a way to identify ourselves in a world in which the traditional ways of classifying ourselves by social class and mainstream religion are losing their purchase: http://ind.pn/ed9EZG via @StevenParrott
• Online 3D fire ants! http://bit.ly/evXdd5 via @BeeSpotter

Last night, the folks over at Infochimps, an online data marketplace - or the "Amazon of data," as they like to call it - were celebrating the launch of their new website and the thousands of new API calls it contains. These API calls are like plug-and-play bits of code developers can insert into their applications, so they can focus on other things like the overall design, the user interface and the features.

After only a few minutes of looking through the types of dataset queries Infochimps has on hand, I was excited about the kinds of new applications they could enable. How about an app that finds everyone on Twitter with a particular keyword in their bio and then lets you follow them or add them to a Twitter list, for example? Or an app that helps you identify the most influential Twitter users? These were just two of the API calls I saw in action last night, but there are thousands more (and they're not all Twitter-related, of course). If you're developing a new data-dependant application, Infochimps is a valuable resource you should check out.

From embedded sensors to high-frequency stock trading to everyday mobile Web applications, the race is on for technologists to build the most efficient systems for quickly streaming large sets of data from one device to another. Sometimes the language that data is communicated in can come with high costs in terms of efficiency. Today the Web's most venerable standards body, the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C), announced official support for a new standardized data format for super-efficient transmission of data.

Efficient XML Interchange, or EXI, is described as a very compact representation of information in XML (extensible markup language). EXI is so efficient that the W3C says it has been found to improve up to 100-fold the performance, network efficiency and power consumption of applications that use XML, including but not limited to consumer mobile apps. It is particularly useful on devices with low memory or low bandwidth.