ReadWriteHack

Having data available electronically is not the same thing as the data being useful. Campaign finance disclosures provided electronically by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), are a good example of that. The New York Times's Fech (not "fetch") is a RubyGem - a packaged application - designed to help journalists and public interest organizations access and make sense of FEC filings.

With the right data, you can get a pretty interesting picture of an area. Whether it's a state, city, or even a street, you can learn a lot from data. Do you need to pack a coat if you're visiting in March? What's the elevation, cost of living, how many people live there? But to answer what is it like? That takes a bit more doing.

This was the topic of Jesper Andersen's talk at Strata, "Building a Data Narrative: Discovering Haight Street." The idea, to "see how far we can go" in understanding San Francisco's famous Haight Street through as much data as possible.

As one of the seven companies that participated in the Alpha release of this new Insights data, we've been very excited about the opportunities this new data presents for pages and their fans. Let's take a closer look at why.

While most discussion around social analytics slips and slides across the valley floor of a wide crevasse between practitioners and business leaders, there has been one metric everyone agreed was important: fans. Fans have been an obvious place to start because your number and everyone else's have been public for years. Also, there's a natural, implied value proposition in the metric because it's about affinity. Surely having a large number of people with expressed affinity for your brand is a good thing (especially if it's more than your competitor has).

A few months ago we told you about a paper by Microsoft researchers, Erik Meijer and Gavin Bierman which argued that non-relational data stores will need to create a standardized database query language in order to achieve widespread adoption.

Today a new potential standard for document databases (and possibly other NoSQL databases) was announced: UnQL.

MongoHQannounced today that it has acquired MongoMachine. Both companies are hosted MongoDB service providers.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. (IRE), a non-profit organization, has made the 2000 and 2010 U.S. Census data easily available in CSV and JSON formats. From the site census.ire.org you can browse through the census data and export what you need.

You can also find the entire site Github.

RunKeeper, a mobile application for tracking your exercise and online community for fitness buffs, opened its API to the public today. Dubbed the HealthGraph, it will provide access to the variety of health and fitness data stored in RunKeeper, such as exercise, sleep, weight and blood pressure. Developers will then be able to build new applications that build upon and make sense of this data.

You can find the API documentation here.

Rapid-I announced this week that it will offer a marketplace for RapidMiner extensions to its open source data mining tool RapidMiner. "Over the years, many of you have been developing new RapidMiner Extensions dedicated to a broad set of topics," the company's announcement stays. "Whereas these extensions are easy to install in RapidMiner - just download and place them in the plugins folder - the hard part is to find them in the vastness that is the Internet." You can visit the beta version of the extension marketplace here.

It doesn't appear that there's a mechanism for offering paid extensions, yet. But Decision Stats blogger Ajay Ohri hopes to see this turn into an app store for algorithms.

RedMonk co-founder and analyst Stephen O'Grady recently gave a talk at Open Source Business Conference. He's posted his notes and slides here. In the talk, he emphasized his idea that there are four generations of software companies, and that selling software is becoming harder and harder. O'Grady sees the way forward for open source companies is leveraging data.

According to O'Grady, the four generations are:

STREST is a new open source protocol and server from Wiredset, the company behind the real-time social media analytics service Trendrr. STREST is HTTP-compatible and is designed for real-time data streaming. Wiredset has released the protocol spec, a server implementation and drivers in Java, Python and JavaScript.

Wiredset created the protocol to deal with the challenges it faced when building the Trendr API. The team needed a way to offer extremely high-volume API calls with low latency, deliver the results in real-time at scale, and do so through a RESTful interface.