links for 2011-01-17

"The idea behind the site is to field questions and answers relating to the practicalities of working with public open data: from discovering data sets, to combining data from different sources in appropriate ways, getting data into formats you can happily work with, or that will play nicely with visualisation or analysis tools you already have, and so on."

Depressing to think that trite Liz Jones piece is taking column inches away from the ongoing stories of Clara Richards, Nathan Tomlinson and Natalie Bailey who all went missing at the same time as Jo Yeates to deafening press silence...

...the original is deftly parodied here

"It's academic purity over practical application. This is foolish, since Linked Data/RDF/SPARQL will fail if programmers don't use the technologies in the real-world. It is also a problem for us as citizens if the UK Government is standardising to data formats that no one in industry (as opposed to academia) actually wants, or can use". Useful rallying cry.

"Essentially, it seems to suggest that Quora users have some protection against their comments being taken out of context or used in other places in ways they might not like - including being quoted by journalists without permission."

The fact that Paul Daniels selling his magic tricks on eBay made it into a Sunday Telegraph editorial fills me with glee. I *heart* trivial editorials like this.

"The Yellow Pages has just been delivered. It's like someone just printed out ten thousand web searches I don't need and posted them to me"