It’s 9:54am in Torquay on a Wednesday morning: One appliance from Torquays fire station was mobilised to reports of a child with a potty seat stuck on its head. On arrival an undistressed two year old female was discovered with a toilet seat stuck on her head. Crews used vaseline and the finger kit to remove the […]
Have a Happy Open Data Day with ScraperWiki
Tomorrow is Open Data Day, and if you’re planning on hacking the web with the Open Knowledge Foundation or Random Hacks of Kindness or your own data hack of choice, here’s some fuel for your fight ( and if you’ve already driven our digger then check out the last video on our API so you […]
Scraping New Frontiers
Today is Columbus Day in the US (yes, I’m working regardless). So I’ve decided to write a post about discovery. This has been my first full week in America. I have toiled Heathrow Terminal 5, battled through the baffling New York subway and scaled the mountains of food to find, well, not the promised land. […]
Four data trends to rule them all, the data scientist king to bind them
My favourite soundbite from O’Reilly’s Strata data conference was a definition of big data. John Rauser, Amazon’s main data scientist, said to me that “data is big data when you can’t process it on one machine”. And naturally, small data is data that you can process on one machine. What’s nice about this definition is it […]
Constructing the Open Data Landscape
In an article in today’s Telegraph regarding Francis Maude’s Public Data Corporation, Michael Cross asks: “What makes the state think it can be at the cutting edge of the knowledge economy“. He writes in terms of market and business share, giving the example of the satnav market worth over $100bn a year yet it’s based […]
Open Data Events – Meet like minded folk
Just a quick shout out to upcoming Open Data events crying out for participation from well minded coding citizens like yourselves: Open Australia and ScraperWiki Hackfest: In sunny down under (Sydney) on 10-11 September. No travel bursaries but it is free! Sign up here. It’s a hacking extravaganza for anyone interested in helping liberate data or […]
Government data release: what’s still out there
James Ball Last week saw big steps forward in public data: on Monday, Prime Minister David Cameron wrote to all government departments, setting out a timetable for the release of a swathe of official datasets. On Wednesday, the first two (senior civil service pay and MRSA infection rates) appeared – but the real meat came […]