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The UK government has published 5 years of nation-wide road safety and casualty data freely online on a map that anyone can view in a web browser. It's a remarkable instance of data-driven public accountability; presumably citizens will use this newly accessible data to apply pressure on government agencies regarding safety improvements. Citizens and researchers will also be able to cross-reference the location of troubled roadways with race and class demographic analysis to illuminate any inequitable allocation of infrastructure resources. It's a bold and enabling action to take online.

The statistics were gathered by independent researchers and put online using eSpatial OnDemand GIS and Open Street Map. Open Street Map is like the Wikipedia of world and local maps, but it's also a popular data platform that many other applications make use of. Map nerds should watch the OpenStreetMap annual conference, State of the Map, for more exciting map and geodata news. The conference opened this morning in Denver, Colorado.

According to bitly, the half-life of a link isn't measured in weeks or days, it's about three hours on most social networks. Does it matter where the link is posted? Absolutely. For the most bang for your social media buck, YouTube is the winner.

The half-life of a link is the amount of time it takes for a link to get half the clicks it will ever receive. The company looked at the half-life of 1,000 popular bitly links posted to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to see whether it matters where a link is posted.

The famine eating up northeast Africa and threatening 13 million people is probably something you've seen out of the corner of your eye. A terrible thing, to be sure, but life goes on. Well, for some. Now, the World Food Programme has pulled open data from the United Nations, USAID and their own food distribution program and used mapping technology to enable us to visualize the data involved; to turn it, in fact, from data into knowledge, from data points to human beings and from what to so what. The resulting map is dynamic and easy to understand, if hard to digest.

"In the map you can see what areas are most affected by the famine, where food is being distributed, and how much more funding is needed to meet the demand," said Bonnie Bogle, of WFP's partners, Development Seed, by email. "For example, you see that the most affected areas have limited humanitarian access, as they are in the al Shabab controlled sections of Somalia."

Steven Wolfram and team have gathered together a big timeline of key events in the history of systematic data and computable knowledge. The team has created a beautiful infographic and a five foot long poster available for mail order (I just bought one, $15 with shipping) in anticipation of the Wolfram Data Summit in DC early next month. We're really at the dawn of a whole new age of data creation, so this timeline will likely look like pre-history relatively soon, but it's fascinating and important none the less.

"[When] I first looked at the completed timeline," Wolfram writes, "the first thing that struck me was how much two entities stood out in their contributions: ancient Babylon, and the United States government... [It] is sobering to see how long the road to where we are today has been. But it is exciting to see how much further modern technology has already made it possible for us to go."

It's hard to keep track of all the database-related terms you hear these days. What constitutes "big data"? What is NoSQL, and why are your developers so interested in it? And now "NewSQL"? Where do in-memory databases fit into all of this? In this series, we'll untangle the mess of terms and tell you what you need to know.

In Part One we covered data, big data, databases, relational databases and other foundational issues. In Part Two we talked about data warehouses, ACID compliance, distributed databases and more. Now we'll cover non-relational databases, NoSQL and related concepts.

It's hard to keep track of all the database-related terms you hear these days. What constitutes "big data"? What is NoSQL, and why are your developers so interested in it? And now "NewSQL"? Where do in-memory databases fit into all of this? In this series, we'll untangle the mess of terms and tell you what you need to know.

In Part One we covered data, big data, databases, relational databases and other foundational issues. In this section we'll talk about data warehouses, ACID compliance, distributed databases and more. In part three, we'll cover non-relational databases, NoSQL and related concepts.

CoverCake, a service that tracks online conversations about books, is launching a new Web-based dashboard app tomorrow, turning its vast library of data into an analytics tool for publishers, authors and fans alike. The new analytics features will enable publishers and authors to measure the impact of promotion, publicity and social media campaigns by seeing the conversations they generate.

Data backup service Mozy (owned by EMC and managed by ReadWriteCloud sponsor VMware) is running an interesting infographic about data storage that looks into how much data there is in the world, what media that data is stored on and where the largest (in square feet) data centers in the world are.

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.