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Public data from the government - is it an opportunity for innovation and essential accountability or a snoozer that no one really cares about? Government transparency advocacy group The Sunlight Foundation offers one example today of something that can be done with government data that is clearly worth doing - but the data they used hasn't been made available on the Obama administration's anemic new data repository Data.gov.

What are people saying on Facebook about the swine flu? Facebook knows, but they won't tell you. The company made a major move today to open up some of the data on the site in some interesting ways - but the conversation on Facebook remains fundamentally closed due to extensive privacy limitations and the company's disinterest in overcoming those limitations in an appropriate way.

Ask Twitter what people are saying on that site about the swine flu and you can get the full story to parse until you're blue in the face. The new Facebook openness is like interoperability between different telephone handset manufacturers but conversation remains closed between individuals. Conversation on Facebook is no more easy to analyze today than it was yesterday; that's the real opportunity here, not just the ability to send and receive Facebook messages through different applications.

The Guardian just launched a new API which will allow third-party developers to access and reuse the Guardian's content database in their own applications. The new API is part of the Guardian's new Open Platform, which, as of today, consists of the API and a Data Store, but the Guardian also announced that it plans to offer more services in the near future. The Data Store is a collection of high quality data sets which are curated by the Guardian and hosted on Google Docs.

Every night we lay down in our beds, our consciousness enters a different state and then we stay that way for the next 8 hours. It's pretty amazing if you think about it! It can be no surprise then that someone has created a way to track and share details about such a big part of our lives. Some people sleep with their friends, now the rest of us can track our sleep - with our friends.

Yawnlog is a wacky new site that lets you track how much sleep you're getting, note how good the sleep was, record your dreams and compare all of that information with your friends. This is no laughing matter! Imagine cross referencing aggregate sleeping hours and moods with a timeline of historically significant events. Silly as this service might sound, we think it sounds pretty cool, too.

Almost every description of P2P in the context of business infrastructure starts something like this: "P2P is notorious for..." This comes from many years of people associating P2P with illegal downloading, to the point that the terms are now almost synonymous. Such an association is inherently unfair, however, because no one equates TCP/IP and crime, despite the fact that TCP/IP is the protocol of choice for many cyber-criminals.

Rather than resorting to out-dated and inaccurate definitions, let's start from scratch and consider the following: what is P2P, really? What is it good for? How can we use it to save and earn money?