Noise to Signal – Coding your own newswire

Seeing as tomorrow is Open Data Day and I claim to be a Data Journalist (I think JournoCoder is more suitable) here’s a little data food for journalistic thought. Here is the site showing the US nuclear reactors power output status. Here is the scraper for that site written by ScraperWiki founder Julian Todd. Here [...]

‘Open’ is the new ‘Social’

The functionality that has set the web world a blaze, created whole industries and churned out billionaires from fiddlers of code is ‘social’. It’s even shaken Google to its core. ‘Social’ has also made news organisations think ‘digital’, however the phoenix that will emerge from the burning embers of the newspaper industry is ‘open’. The [...]

Opening Data, Opening Minds

#opendata from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo. You might be wondering what this short documentary has to do with journalism or even what open data has to do with journalism. No doubt you are aware that journalism has been facing a ‘crisis’ for a while now. Not just because of the recession and shrinking advertisers [...]

Data Journalism: The Story So Far

And here’s what Tim Berner-Lee, founder of the internet, said regarding the subject of data journalism: Journalists need to be data-savvy… [it's] going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyse it and picking out what’s interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it [...]

Open Data Campaigning Camp

Who? This is a fringe event to the E-Campaigning Forum run by Fairsay. Rolf Kleef (Open for Change) and Tim Davies (Practical Participation) are co-ordinating the day in a voluntary capacity, with support from Javier Ruiz (Open Rights Group) What? The Open Data Campaigning Camp will immediately follow the annual E-Campaigning Forum (#ECF11), so will be targeted particularly at campaigners [...]

Opening My Mind to Open Data

I recently attended an Open Data Master Class and I would like to share my thoughts, not as an expert but as a novice looking in on the CAR/Hacks Hackers/data journalism embryo. This is really a reflection on the nuggets of advice offered by some chieftains in the global village of data miners. Open is [...]

Open Data Master Class

I’ll be at this event all day tomorrow so expect your weekly diet of data, journalism and Gov 2.0. Here’s the blurb: “The past few months have seen a number of high profile announcements on the release of central and local government data for free. The Prime Minister launched the data.gov.uk portal to ‘open up [...]