Simon Willison and his team at the Guardian in the UK have brought a dream a step nearer to becoming true for me with his new Investigate Your MP's Expenses site. After looking at government profligacy in the USA I decided the only thing to do was to open up public accounts to public scrutiny.
Simon's site (quite independently conceived) is a practical demonstration of the idea's feasibility on a large scale. All we need now is a sponsor with deep pockets and an interface to Mechanical Turk. The next election is going to be interesting.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C Clarke
Musings from the technological frontier
Showing posts with label guardian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guardian. Show all posts
June 18, 2009
March 10, 2009
Congrats to Simon Willison
Simon tweeted recently to announce that the launch of the Guardian Open Platform appeared to have gone well. Clearly this is a newspaper management that "gets it", and the service looks fascinating from a technical point of view.
I am hoping to find out how easily information services can be built on this content.
The Guardian is one of the things I miss from back home. During my time back in Scotland it became a real pleasure to drop in at the newsagents near the station for a copy of The Guardian. So now I can at least get the content.
Congratulations, Simon! I am really looking forward to hearing about this development project at PyCon in a couple of weeks. Or at EuroPython later this summer
I am hoping to find out how easily information services can be built on this content.
The Guardian is one of the things I miss from back home. During my time back in Scotland it became a real pleasure to drop in at the newsagents near the station for a copy of The Guardian. So now I can at least get the content.
Congratulations, Simon! I am really looking forward to hearing about this development project at PyCon in a couple of weeks. Or at EuroPython later this summer
The Guardian Goes Open
So, some newspapers do appear to "get" the open source phenomenon. I linked recently to Washington Port open source software and now in the UK a national daily newspaper has opened access to its content. Hooray for the Guardian! Though I think you'll find if you look at the top left that they have made a typographical error in their masthead
Nice to see a Python application advertising on the Open Platform site. [Edited after correction from Simon Willison] Of course the Open Platform application is in Java/Spring. The client-side application, however, is in Python. So that gives anyone who already knows Python (say, the growing army of Google App Engine programmers) a head start.
Get to it, Python tribe!
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