Chips, dip and government data are everyone's three favorite things to take to a party, right? Ok, so government data is actually quite boring on its own, but in these exciting times of democratized programming, government data can be turned into some pretty exciting mashups.
That's just what the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation is aiming to make more possible with its work to make government and related data more available with its new Apps for America contest. More than 40 open source applications and websites making use of that data entered the contest and today the six fabulous winners were announced. We've got a five minute screencast tour of the winners below.
Yahoo bought popular social bookmarking service Delicous three and a half years ago and it's just now making moves to allow outsiders more access to the incredible data that's stored there. The company announced this morning that the Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) platform can now pull in Delicious bookmarking history and top tags for any URL that's been bookmarked two or more times.
Make no mistake about it, the vast majority of people on the web still have no idea that they can save their bookmarks outside their browsers. Yahoo has done a terrible job leveraging and growing this incredible database of user-categorized links of interest. Now the company is giving developers an opportunity to do so. Why is this important? Read on for some examples of what's now possible thanks to BOSS/Delicious integration.
Popular but legally challenged MP3 search engine Seeqpod will soon start charging developers for access to its data, according to a source close to the company. A lot of interesting music discovery sites are about to go quiet, at least for a little while.
Seeqpod searches MP3 files uploaded independently all around the web; it's a great way to explore music and build playlists, and so far it's been a good way to pipe music into a wide variety of other websites. Starting next week, developers will be required to pay $3 for every 1000 search queries performed on their sites powered by Seeqpod. They will also have the option to put up $5k to license the Seeqpod crawler and index.
Substance Labs has put together a new site called SXSW Lesson. This Twitter-powered mashup site listens for tweets with the hashtag #sxswlesson, archives them, and then throws one of them up when you visit. This is your lesson. You can then check comments on the lesson to see how others interpreted it, add your own comments using Twitter OAuth (which doesn't reveal your password), and look for other lessons.
The Sunlight Foundation, one of the coolest geek organizations on the Internet, announced today that it has added $4 million to its budget compliments of the Omidyar Network, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's group. Sunlight works with government information made publicly available to turn it into websites and services that anyone can find useful.
At the start of what could be the most open US Presidential administrations in decades, the Sunlight Foundation's work should be more potent, interesting and useful in fostering accountability than ever before.
Yvo Schaap is a 23 year old student in the Netherlands who spends at least some of his time developing ways to visualize information. More specifically, he has been working with the open Twitter API and generating some amazing informatics visuals from the resulting output. Plus, the tools and methods he uses to get the visuals is almost a lesson in new media artistry.
While reading is one of the main activities on the Internet, a lot of sites pay very little attention to the readability of their text. Instead, the reader's eye is constantly drawn to other UI elements, ads, and widgets. Arc90's Readability experiment is setting out to change this. Readability is a small bookmarklet that extracts the text from almost any web site and displays it on an easy to read page that removes all of the clutter that can make reading on the Internet so hard sometimes.
Some people say that "the real-time web" could be the next generation of post-Google search. Social media tools have greatly increased not just the number of people posting content online but also the speed with which they are able to do so. Do we need a new search paradigm that prioritizes publishing freshness higher than page rank?
Google backers say that Google is already capable of indexing anything online mere moments after it's been published - but the user experience in search doesn't really feel "real time" right now. Movable Type consultant Mark Carey came up with a simple solution this weekend that could change your use of Google more than anything else has in a while.
Content creation at Wikipedia is slowing down. The already small number of active regular editors is on the decline and Jimmy Wales has called for live edits to be held for approval on many pages, a step sure to slow contributions even further.
The tapering of fresh content doesn't have to mean Wikipedia's death, though. The site contains a gargantuan amount of human created and tended but largely machine readable and structured data. That's a potential gold mine in terms of a potential pay-off in innovation. Wikipedia can offer developers opportunities to glean analysis, supplemental content and structured data from its years-old store of collaboratively generated information. All of that is possible, but Wikipedia as a platform can't be taken for granted.
Earlier this month, developer and mashup extraordinaire John Herren released Reading Radar, a mashup that combines the New York Times Bestseller's API with Amazon's API, and created a simple, purposeful site dedicated to listing the popular books on the New York Times Bestseller list.
Using various open source technologies such as jQuery, the Yahoo! User Interface Library and the Maintainable Framework, Reading Radar lets you scan the New York Times top sellers and read reviews and related book information from Amazon; all without the distractions of other content on both the New York Times and Amazon sites.
