A new app, Map the Fallen, gathers and aggregates information on war casualties in the Middle East from U.S. and coalition nations, giving dead servicemembers' names, ages, pictures, hometowns, places of death, and the cause or incident of death.

There are links to memorial sites where users can sign guestbooks, leaving comments about the departed. The app also includes links to releases from the Department of Defense and local obituaries or other press coverage, when available. Map the Fallen allows users to "fly" around the globe from the dead soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine's hometown to the place where he or she was killed. Users can also use the timeline feature to visualize how many casualties occurred at any one time or during any period of time from 2001 to the present day.

The map also includes icons pointing out places, books, news articles, photos, or other data that are geographically relevant.

Users can also record and save video "tours" of available data.

Undoubtedly somber, probably (for most of us) unbearably sad, the project is the result of four years' work by Sean, who develops geospatial content for the Google Earth Outreach team.

New federal CIO Vivek Kundra is in charge of the site, which will act as a central repository for government data, including XML, CSV, KML files and more. At launch a mere 47 data sets are included and they appear to lean towards the least controversial matters. None the less, it's exciting to see the effort happening. Hopefully some awesome mashups are on the way!

There are many, many sets of data available from the federal government but the Data.gov site says it was selective about quality and standards when choosing what to include. It's hard not to compare other sources of government data and feel disappointed, though. The privately built USGovXML.com contains far more data and was built by one independent developer over four months. That site lists ten Department of Interior XML feeds, for example, none of which appear on Data.gov. You can find a feed of food recalls there, but not on Data.gov.

Twenty six government agencies are represented in the catalog, though not all are offering raw data. The FBI is listed as a source but only offers a widget that can be placed on websites, not access to raw data.

New York Times data wonk Derek Willis pointed out that the initial offerings are non-controversial. "Most are from USGS, EPA and National Weather Service," Willis observed this morning. "No [data from] Department of Homeland Security, State or DOJ."

Likewise, a search of the data sets for keywords like food, prisons and drug all bring up zero results. Those are examples of particularly important topics because they are matters of justice and injustice - shedding light into dark corners where injustices are being perpetrated is one of the most important things that government data and the subsequent computer assisted reporting can accomplish.

There are no RSS feeds available for the whole catalog or search queries, something that would be very useful for tracking additions of new data. We expect that will change soon.

People will no doubt argue that some data is much better than no data, and while that's true: for a new federal office to engage with such an important topic with the weight of history and the whole administration behind it and then come up with something this limited is disappointing.

API and mashup watcher John Musser of ProgrammableWeb was more generous than we are about the initial offerings:

"They're off to an excellent start. It's a big step in accessibility of government data. As we've been seeing with other v1 gov-data efforts, like the recently available data on senate votes: step one is give people structured data like xml, step two (or later) is to make it available via an API. They have a healthy amount of metadata. The number of data sets is not that large, but of course it's just the beginning."

It is just the beginning and we applaud the launch of this effort. We hope that the initial launch will pale in comparison to the long term value of this collection of data.

The folks at Sunlight Labs, Google, O'Reilly/TechWeb and Craig Newmark just launched a new part of their Apps for America contest to build the best mashups and data visualization tools for data in the new Data.gov site. Check it out!

See also the newly launched Whitehouse.gov/open - launches today just keep popping up.

One year ago we wrote about a fascinating service called PolicyMap, a website where users can view more than 4000 different data sets laid out on a map down to the city street level. I found which parts of my neighborhood donated more money to John McCain than to Barack Obama, and vice versa. Today PolicyMap launched a new feature for subscribers that allows up to three points of data to be cross-referenced. You may or may not be interested in subscribing to PolicyMap, but anyone can see from the screencast below just how much potential technologies like this have.

This is pretty interesting stuff, is it not? The ability to cross-reference different sets of data with factors like geographic location is really exciting. Extrapolate from this, if you will, by imagining what kind of things could be made possible if programmatic access to data from Facebook could be layered into systems like this. Or any other large data set that's hording it. Anonymous aggregate data made available to developers who can build interfaces that allow end users to analyze that data is likely to be an even more important resource in the near future than it is today.

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.

John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, told Politico that the reason he's been given for the lack of XML feeds is this: "the secretary of the Senate has cited a general standing policy ... that they're not supposed to present votes in a comparative format, that senators have the right to present their votes however they want to...it's pretty bad."

Dave Lundy, acting executive director of the Chicago-based Better Government Association, told Politico again that: "It's a strategy to make information hard to find and hard to digest and hard to analyze...Call me a cynic, but I don't ... think [government entities] deserve the benefit of the doubt. We have ample experience to know that people try to hide information, even in plain sight."

Apparently, those problems were washed away this week by the tides of open technology. The Washington Post has offered something similar to what's now available for some time, but there's something to be said for what we hope will be a big, fat, official pipe of data.

We learned of the news this morning when New York Times technologist, Derek Willis, celebrated mention of the news by Rob Pierson, who yesterday began a new job leading new media initiatives for the House Democratic Caucus. The Sunlight Foundation said last week that neither the House nor the senate "maintain any reasonable database of lawmaker votes." The House of Representatives does release their votes in structured format, though.

Willis points out that the new Senate data feeds aren't perfect; the absence of Bioguide ID information linking Senators' names to their online profiles creates an unnecessary additional step for developers, for example.

It's exciting news none-the-less. "It's good to see high profile senators from both parties behind this," says John Musser, founder of the web's leading mashup and API directory, Programmable Web. "Those first steps are often the hardest. That is, just getting understanding of the value, getting buy-in and then having the data accessible in a developer friendly format. The next logical step is to wrap it in an API; having the XML is closer to having an RSS feed, there's not a lot of developer control of what data to retrieve. An API typically gives much more control over what data gets retrieved. Like 'give me all roll call votes for January 2009', versus 'here's the last 20 roll call votes.' Or all roll call votes by a specific senator, etc."

Musser says that he's seeing a broad movement towards increased access to government data. That work is being done by both official sources like this new Senate feed and the data-centric Recovery.org and by outside organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and the New York Times, work Musser is tracking closely.

What's left to open up? Check out, for example, this list of the 8 most desirable but unavailable government data sets, per Willis from the NYT. As of today, one of those can be checked off the list.

Even the app's developer agrees that the app crossed the line, overstepping Facebook's much celebrated privacy controls. We're still disappointed though, and we wish that this rich source of data could be opened up for developers and users to build value on top of. What kind of publishing system doesn't offer an RSS feed? A fundamentally closed one.

The argument is that the News Feed RSS made it too easy to violate privacy conditions put on some users' Facebook data.

Facebook hasn't responded yet to our request for an official comment, but Facebook software engineer, Ari Steinberg, explained in an unofficial comment on the Activity Streams discussion group, "We're certainly not opposed to enabling you to export your own content (in fact, we're always trying to work on ways to make that easier), but exporting all your friends' content to a totally public place without their permission isn't cool."

But it was really useful. Sometimes privacy is at odds with innovation, and while we would never want to say that privacy is illegitimate - we're not happy to see it shut down major potential avenues for innovation either.

If the app published an authenticated feed (meaning you had to log in to view it) and if the apps around the web had better support for authenticated feeds, then the story would probably be different. That's not where we're at, though; even the very popular Google Reader can't handle password protected RSS feeds.

App developer, Teck Chia, says privacy issues and copyright violation in the use of the phrase "News Feed" were both cited by Facebook when the app was shut down. Chia understands the privacy concern but hopes to be able to find a solution shortly. One option may be to publish only a user's own items in a feed, perhaps folding in the updates of friends who have added the app as well and specifically opted-in, and perhaps sending items through the feed that say merely that "Your friend John updated his staus, click here to log in to Facebook and read it."

We're not sure how useful those options sound. It's not surprising but it is a real disappointment that Facebook shut the app down. The wall that keeps Facebook user data in and private by default feels too contrary to the fundamental nature of the internet for it to last. In a poll we performed last week, 40% of our readers said they wanted Facebook to open their data either a little or a lot. We're sure the percentage of all Facebook users who feel that way would be smaller, but a closed pocket of the web seems to us to be something that will be worn away in time.

There may not be an RSS feed for your Facebook News Feed today, but it sure seems like only a matter of time until there is.

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.

Fillibusted - a site aiming to hold filibustering Congresspeople accountable for their actions.

Legistalker - a site that tracks news, Twitter, YouTube and other online activity by and about members of Congress.

HelloCongress - like Digg for Congressional priorities, with a twist.

Know Thy Congressman - a beautiful informational pop-up about Congresspeople that you can invoke anywhere you find their names on the web.

Yeas and Nays - a sophisticated Firefox plug-in that helps you click-to-call members of Congress.

E-Paper Trail - a data rich site to compare and learn about Congresspeople.

There are also a number of Honorable Mentions included on the Sunlight contest page.

Some of these look more useful than others so far but with a little extra support who knows? It's an increasingly data-driven world, but in order to truly get the most value out of that data the web needs interface and mashup developers. That's why it's such a great idea for Sunlight to support these and other developers the way they do.

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.

BOSS is a technology that allows any website to use the Yahoo index and search processing power to build a topic-specific search engine on their own site. What could BOSS plus Delicious look like?

Some query types we can imagine being made possible by this integration are:

* I do a news search for a topic like the Textron buy-out or golfer Ross Fisher (two hot search terms today) and BOSS + Delicious shows me which URLs in my list of search results have been tagged "analysis" the most, or "biography."

* Search an index of food blogs for recipes and tell me which of them have been bookmarked the most and have been tagged "Mediterranean" and "vegetarian." The words Mediterranean and vegetarian may not appear anywhere in the text of the recipe, but human readers can recognize the recipe as fitting into both those categories and tag it as such when bookmarking it.

* Look up the links that my blog commenters post along with their comments and show me the top tags that other people have used to categorize those links. Perhaps, more marketers than engineers commented on my last blog post. I'd like to know that. Perhaps, I've had an influx of teachers, preachers or veterinarians commenting on my blog lately. Who wouldn't want to see that kind of data?

These are just a few examples of the kinds of data that we can imagine BOSS + Delicious offering up. We're sure readers can noodle just a bit on permutations of URL, times bookmarked, and top tags in order to come up with all kinds of other scenarios. Any time you've got millions of people saying "this link is important to me and these are the words I'd use to describe it" then that's really valuable information to be able to access programmatically.

Now imagine what could happen if Yahoo helped more people discover social bookmarking and opened up even more access to that data. It's absolutely tragic that this hasn't happened yet, but perhaps a little BOSS action is the beginning. If knowledge and information are value, then Yahoo has taken a small pipe connected to a potentially huge reservoir of black gold and let it just run down the drain, unused for the last three years. Yahoo adopted a baby with the potential to grow into an incredible adult and then forgot to feed and care for it for three years. It's quite upsetting.

It would be great if Delicious saw continued development in directions that supported this data-centric approach of leveraging crowdsourced attention signals. We're not sure how much hope for that is warranted though, given that so little progress has been made in that direction so far.

Disclosures: The author is a member of a Yahoo! Product Advisory Council and has multiple consulting clients in or around the social bookmarking sector.

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.

We've contacted the company for comment but haven't heard back yet. Developers say that the company changed its API this morning and they are having trouble accessing the service. Semantic social search company HeadUp has published a solution to that problem.

We're surprised that there has been no discussion of a free level of service. According to a credible-looking internal email passed along to us: "Starting April 1 SeeqPod will begin charging all API partners $0.003/query ($3 for 1000 queries) -- payable via credit card or Paypal." There's a chance that this is an April Fools joke, but it wouldn't be a very funny one.

Looking over the ProgrammableWeb list of APIs tagged music, it appears the most likely candidate to replace Seeqpod as a free music API is Imeem. That company's TOS says it reserves the right to start charging for access to its data as well. Imeem doesn't appear to be as wide open as Seeqpod has been, either.

Some developers pull audio in from music videos on YouTube, but that doesn't seem like a sustainable solution. That's what our favorite music search site, Songza, does: Imeem plus YouTube with ads on screen. It may have been too good to be true: any song uploaded anywhere by anyone, for free, forever!

On some level the disruption can be blamed on the major labels' fear of free music on the web and the belief that by making content easier to discover online Seeqpod is facilitating theft of intellectual property. (Imagine if search engines had to verify the legal status of everything they pointed searchers to!) Ultimately, though, if what Seeqpod is doing were easy then we expect lots of people would be doing it. It's inevitable that the company is seeking to make some money.

We're concerned about this making it more difficult for late-night coders around the world to bust out a shocking new interface for listening to music, but we presume that innovation will live on - even if inconvenienced. We hope it works out for both Seeqpod and the developers who require free access to music in order to do what they do.

So we thought (as we often do), wouldn't it be cool to combine the random meeting of people with the lessons learned from SXSW presentations? After some quick emails back to SWHQ to discuss, the idea for SXSWLesson.com was born.

We think that SL is on to something here - the reason so many people go to SXSW Interactive in the first place is to bump into other people, have inspiring discussions about stuff, make new friends and overall learn a lot. The panels only go so far, and this tool elegantly captures the gestalt of the conference, random topics, spontaneous conversations, and new stuff to learn.

This is one of the very few really good uses for Twitter hashtags that we have seen. Take a suggestion from us and bookmark SXSW Lesson; we think it has a lot of potential. Just wait, you will see increasing activity and new submissions coming in all the time. Plus, it acts as yet another way to generate a list of really awesome people to follow on Twitter, and that's a definite value-add in our book.

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.

After eight years of Bush era secrecy, an Obama era Sunlight should have far more fodder to work with. The group's work should be just as important as ever; the new administration is just as in need of accountability around things like corporate influence and human rights policies as any other before it.

The Omidyar Network has a long history of funding experimental new projects on the web, from nonprofit grants like this one for Sunlight to investments in ground-breaking private companies like Digg, Seesmic, Wikia and Linden Labs.

Today's is the third round of funding Omidyar has provided Sunlight, bringing the Foundation's total support for the group to $8 million.