A PR firm recently invited me to review their client’s product, saying that if I did review it I would be entered into a prize draw with other ‘qualifying’ bloggers to win an iPad 2. It was a product I might ordinarily have covered, but this approach made me reluctant. Here’s reason number 1: I asked myself whether the PR
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Following the post earlier this week on XML and RSS for journalists I wanted to look at another important format for journalists working with data: JSON. JSON is a data format which has been rising in popularity over the past few years. Quite often it is offered alongside – or instead of – XML by various information services, such as
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When people start out blogging they often ask what blogging platform they should use – WordPress or Blogger? Tumblr or Posterous? It’s impossible to give an answer, because the first questions should be: who is going to use it, how, and what and who for? To illustrate how the answers to those questions can help in choosing the best platform,
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In a guest post Lorenz Matzat, editor of ZEIT Online’s Open Data Blog, writes about the background to their online app exploring the issues around data retention by mobile phone companies. It’s not very often that one can follow the direct impact of an article, let alone a piece of data journalism. But the visualization of the cellphone data of Malte
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Reading through the Online Journalism blog post on Getting full addresses for data from an FOI response (using APIs), the following phrase – relating to the composition of some Google Refine code to parse a JSON string from the Google geocoding API – jumped out at me: “This took a bit of trial and error…” [...]
If you are working with data chances are that sooner or later you will come across XML – or if you don’t, then, well, you should do. Really. There are some very useful resources in XML format – and in RSS, which is based on XML – from ongoing feeds and static reference files to XML that is provided in
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A post on the Guardian Datablog earlier today took a dataset collected by the Tweetminster folk and graphed the sorts of thing that journalists tweet about ( Journalists on Twitter: how do Britain’s news organisations tweet?). Tweetminster maintains separate lists of tweeting journalists for several different media groups, so it was easy to grab the [...]
Regular readers will know how I do quite like to dabble with visual analysis, so here are a couple of doodles with some of the university fees data that is starting to appear. The data set I’m using is a partial one, taken from the Guardian Datastore: Tuition fees 2012: what are the universities charging?. [...]
Journalists with an interest in realtime data should keep an eye on a forthcoming service from DataSift which promises to allow users to access a feed of Twitter tweets filtered along any combination of over 40 qualities. In addition – and perhaps more interestingly – the service will also offer extra context: “from services including Klout (influence metrics), PeerIndex (influence), Qwerly (linked social
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At the start of this month I said that journalists were failing to “protect the public sphere”. Well, here’s just one example of this in action that we need to be watching. Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, has confirmed to the Open Rights Group “that discussion are ongoing between rights-holders and Internet Service Providers about ‘self-regulatory’
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