Somehow a week’s slipped by since the Open Govt Data Barcamp and Hackfest in Wellington without me giving an update here. It was a great event with around 150 people putting their heads together on the Saturday to brainstorm the why, where, who and how of making more government data readily available to the public in [...]
Sunday, August 23, 2009
First of all, what’s Open Govt Data Bar Camp? “The New Zealand Open Government Bar Camp is an “unconference” for people who are interested in making government-held data more freely available for others to re-use. An “unconference” is an alternative participant-driven event, that avoids aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations. [...]
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Everyblock.com announced this week that it has been acquired by news organisation MSNBC.com. Everyblock.com takes data from local government, libraries, police, emergency services and many more sources and ‘arranges it’ geographically so that visitors to the website can get a picture of what’s happening on their street. They can see figures for house listings, crime, new [...]
Monday, January 26, 2009
Clips from the BBC's Britain From Above series.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
I love good data visualisations and look forward to seeing them used more often on news sites. I was delighted to come across www.flowingdata.com the other day via a Twitter link to this visualisation of people tweeting about President Obama's inauguration (links to flowingdata.com)
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Erik Ulken has posted a must-read top 10 list of lessons learned while setting up the data desk in the LA Times newsroom.The data desk's job is to take detailed information that's dreary to read in text or table form and make it useful by presenting it in compelling and interactive formats. A well-known example is the LA Time's Homicide Map.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
I can't remember where I picked up this link to Seth Godin's post on how the New York Times could do better, but it's a goody. A couple of points from it: 1. Use their influence and brand to enable users to spread their content. Why, precisely, aren't the Zagats guides a NY Times product? Or Yelp? That's a quarter of a billion dollars worth of value that the paper with the most influential restaurant reviews page didn't create. Why didn't they build Wikipedia? Or a platform to influence the way politicians govern?
Monday, March 10, 2008
Two examples of ways to present data in a new, palatable and engaging way online.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
I got back last night from a really productive week in Wellington meeting people and attending Webstock, a conference for web designers but universally relevant. A big thank-you to the organisers: the event was well-run, aside from highly patchy wi-fi, and turned out to be an engaging, useful and enjoyable couple of days.
Evolving Links
Sunday, September 6, 2009
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