A feed for every block
A NYT article from this past weekend details the efforts of NYC, San Francisco and other cities to publish municipal data in structured formats -- and encourage the use of that data for mashups and mobile apps. Incidentally, now you know one of the items on our Christmas list.
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Odd that today's article didn't mention EveryBlock -- probably the first and most technically ambitious hyperlocal mashup site, and the subject of a Times piece in April. EveryBlock is now owned by MSNBC. Check it out. If, like me, you've lived in some of the covered cities, it's kinda fun to poke around in the data for your old neighborhoods.
Nerdy Stuff
There's plenty of benign screen-scraping behind projects like these, which is an interesting subject in itself. If you write Python, check out Beautiful Soup; for Ruby, look at Nokogiri, which is right now more capable than hpricot or Rubyful Soup. PHP has some native methods for doing the same (though you should squeeze some data sources through tidy, first), but the Python and Ruby libs are cooler, easier to use and more fun.
LQ
... said Lou Quillio on Dec 7, 2009 at 6:39 PM | link