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A quick burst of 12 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
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NHS data is routinely published – but if you want the really interesting stuff you have to dig a little deeper
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The government is to change the law so that all data released under the Freedom of Information Act will be fully accessible to computers
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Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude told the Conservative party conference in Birmingham that the [...]
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Crime. On your computer. Geddit? Photo by alancleaver_2000 on Flickr. Some rights reserved
A quick burst of 11 links for you to chew over, as picked by [...]
Ask every local authority in England to publish all its spending over £500 in an open format and what do you get? A whole load of PDFs. See our list of the best and the worst
• Get the data
It’s an [...]
Plus open data (or not) and its attitudes, mobile development trends and more
Google has been collecting its Street View photos for Antarctica for some time. Photo by National Library NZ on The Commons on Flickr. Some rights reserved
A quick burst [...]
Data journalism trainer and writer Paul Bradshaw explains how to get started in data journalism, from getting to the data to visualising it
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I’ve had some curious conversations about AOL acquiring TechCrunch (I nearly inadvertently wrote TechCrunch acquiring AOL… perhaps file that under Arrington/wishlist) but tech blogs have been eerily devoid of deeper comment on analysis on the deal beyond backslapping and congratulations.
As Kellan tweeted: “Could TechCrunch after 5+ years writing about the biz, possibly be naive enough to believe, “Nothing will change, just more resources!”?
I expect most entrepreneurs would feel they were taking their professional life in their hands if they spoke out against TechCrunch. And while, yes yes, it is a powerhouse for the startup community as I said yesterday, many people have said that they question how healthy it is for one blog to have so much influence. Arrington is so woven into the startup scene that this deal represents success for ‘one of us’. No-one wants to poop that party, especially when star struck by MC Hammer. Seriously.
Check out ilovepopula’s TechCrunch AOL anthem on Soundcloud: “TechCrunch belongs to us,” he sings.
Privately, those in the know are questioning whether Arrington will survive the three year tie-in he’s signed. “Three years is to long,” one said. “I give him a year, even with the money on the table.”
Om Malik, who broke the story about the deal, last night wrote that Arrington is both a ruthless competitor and extremely loyal friend, which I think means that the only way he can cover news about TechCrunch itself is to do it ‘straight as a straight thing’. That’s much the same for the rest of the tech blogs.
Malik did give us a good infographic on Arrington’s road to millions, as well as the nugget that the price was at least $25m, and possibly as much as $60m. The really interesting story will be finding out what Arrington does next.
The brains behind the OpenlyLocal site assesses where we’ve got to with local government spending. It’s a mixed bag – and some of the worst is really bad
• Datablog: see who has released what
Oh no, not you again. Photo by Cristóbal Cobo Romaní on Flickr. Some rights reserved
Now that the guidelines for the publishing of local council spending data have been published, it’s a good point to take stock of how councils are actually, well, publishing the data. And the picture is none too pretty.
Out of the 66 councils (of a total of 434) publishing data (they have until January to start doing it), only 32 are publishing it in the correct format – as a comma-separated file which means it’s easy to open in spreadsheets or import into database, or reuse in mashups. The rest are using a variety of tricky formats (e.g. Word, Excel files) that make it problematic at best to use the information as data, and to combine it with other data, so that it can be compared it over time, and with other authorities.
The worst offenders are those publishing it as PDFs, a document format that is ideal for printing (which was what it was designed for), and terrible for extracting data from.
I’ve been told privately by some staff working for those authorities that they’ve been instructed to use PDFs precisely because it will make reuse more difficult.
I should declare an interest here. I run OpenlyLocal, which opens up local government data, and also helped draw up the guidelines on behalf of the Local Pubic Data Panel on which I sit. We’re also importing all the spending data and matching it up against companies and charities, and releasing the result as open data.
A good example of how two councils can take completely different approaches to the same thing comes with Trafford Council and Birmingham City Council. Both have published their information within the past couple of days.
Trafford published theirs as a CSV file, and using standards set out in the guidance, which means that it can be instantly compared with any other council using the same guidance (and, incidentally, published on their excellent open data page listing large amounts of data that can be reused without restriction). They are also looking at publishing previous years’ spending in the same format, to make it easy to see how spending has changed over time.
Birmingham on the other hand published theirs as a PDF on a confusing and messy page. However, not only is it not reusable as data without manually extracting it from the PDF file, there’s none of the richness of the Trafford council data. No department names, no supplier ids, no descriptions of what the payment was for, and no classification. Comparison by category or by department is therefore impossible. They also seem to have silently redacted information, meaning that it’s impossible to challenge whether a payment to supplier should have been redacted, as you’ll never know it was made.
[Charles Arthur notes: with some effort, though, it has been transformed into a spreadsheet by Paul Daniel.]
The scary thing is, however, is that Birmingham is by no means the worst., and in fact there are many councils publishing the information not only as PDFs, but as PDFs with no licence for reuse, and with very little data in it. Special mention here should go to Hammersmith & Fulham which trumpeted its publication in June of spending information for Jan-Mar, albeit as a near unusable PDF, but since then hasn’t published a thing.
However the award for the council with the most useless spending data is the London Borough of Wandsworth, in south-west London. First, the information is stuck in a PDF (and for the techies out there: it’s been published with headings on each page, meaning that extraction is more tricky than usual).
Second, there is no licence for reuse, meaning that the website Terms & Conditions apply, in this case “Intellectual property rights arising from this site and its contents belong to the council. Use of the contents is limited to private and non-commercial use purposes only and may not be further exploited without prior written permission of the Council.”
Third, the information consists of a supplier name and an amount (presumably a total for the month). No date. No reference. No department. No category. No supplier id. No description. No classification.
Somehow, this is not what the Secretary of State had in mind, I think when he ordered councils to open their books to the public.
One ray of hope: Eric Pickles, the secretary of state, is expected to make an announcement on Friday telling councils that they must obey the guidelines. It will be interesting to see if it is retrospective – and how quickly it has to be implemented. But something really needs to change in some places.
Charles Arthur adds: one of the points of the Free Our Data campaign was that publishing data like this would create opportunities for organisations like OpenlyLocal to create businesses doing things with the data that councils couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Look at what’s happened with the number of apps for finding Boris Bikes in London, for example: that’s a commercial opportunity for app writers created entirely from making the data free. (And it has the byproduct of encouraging the use of the bikes, so everyone wins.)
When local councils try to obstruct that, it holds back the private sector – and nobody benefits, not even the councils. We’ll seek an interview with Mr Pickles on this matter in the future to see whether he sees it the same way – and what action he might take.
A flag went up last week when Inc Magazine published a piece called “The Way I Work“, by Mike Arrington. When has he ever taken time out to big up his own business?
It indicated, five years after the tech news site started, Arrington pausing for a rare moment to take stock of the TechCrunch state of things, and he made a nod to a change in pace – moving to Seattle to be nearer his parents and to demand a little more time for himself. He recaps the moment when he was spat on by an entrepreneur at a conference in Germany, and an episode of death threats – testament to how furiously influential TechCrunch had become to the startup scene, and how Arrington’s takes-no-prisoners style won him as many enemies as friends.
Regardless of his personal style, TechCrunch is a powerhouse of tech reporting. Arrington prides himself on breaking news about web startups and tech giants first, regularly bulldozing PRs and entrepreneurs to get his way.
In the end though, it was Om Malik who got the story – TechCrunch has sold to AOL. It started with a rumour; within a day and a half it was all sewn up and Arrington had signed the papers live on stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
What next for TechCrunch? It’s a high prestige buy for AOL, which is trying to boost its editorial operation under new chief executive Tim Armstrong. Being bought by AOL was the kiss of death for Bebo, but under Armstrong the company appears to have more focus; Armstrong insisted Bebo and ICQ were offloaded, but, along with the TechCrunch deal, also bought online video network 5min and Think Labs, who build social networking tools.
Arrington stops slightly short of waxing lyrical about AOL, but is clearly a fan. His post on the deal says he intends to stay with AOL for “a very, very long time” and that the team has incentives to stay on for three years. Given that TechCrunch is only five years old, that might turn out of to be a very long lock-in when things get less formal and, with familiarity, more contemptuous.
Peter Rojas, the founder of Engadget – which AOL bought in 2005 as part of Weblogs Inc – told The Atlantic last night that working with AOL’s management back then “it was pretty difficult to get stuff done … at that time AOL was saddled with way too many layers of management”. AOL today is a very different place, he says, but the state of being an entrepreneur can be hard in a big company.
When signing the papers on stage, Arrington asked the audience if he should go ahead or not – an unscientific 60% said yes, 40% said no. Which says something for the makeup of the audience. Arrington sold for around $25m, of which he is the major stakeholder. CNBC says the deal was more like $40m, but it is likely to be a $25m cash and the rest dependent on Arrington staying for three years. He’d also turned down offers from Yahoo and CNet.
On stage with Armstrong in a rushed announcement, Arrington quips: “We can just use the Bebo agreement as the basis for the deal – is that OK with you?”
Knock yourself out on the video:
Robert Scoble, Dave Winer and former TechCruncher Marshall Kirkpatrick, piled in to congratulate Arrington (Sarah Lacey was the only discreet critic, tweeting “sad“). But AOL will have to allow Arrington a significant amount of space in which to operate. Arrington is more capable of commanding that space than anyone, but place a bet on how long before he gets itchy feet and needs to build something new. After the thrill of the deal, where do you go from there?
I doubt Arrington craves stability, even if he is umbilically tied to TechCrunch. He calls himself a blogger, but he’s more a very driven entrepreneur. Few industries change faster than technology, and if there’s a new market and a new opportunity Arrington will rightly want to be in there. He’ll have to wait three years – and that’s a very long time in tech.
