If you thought you couldn’t use the Google Maps API any more as a journalist, this update to the Google Geo Developers Blog should make you reconsider. From Nieman Journalism Lab: “Certain web apps will be given blanket exemptions from charging. Here’s Google: “Maps API applications developed by non-profit organisations, applications deemed by Google to be in the public interest, and
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I was very excited recently to read on the Scraperwiki mailing list that the website was working on making it possible to create an RSS feed from a SQL query. Yes, that’s the sort of thing that gets me excited these days. But before you reach for a blunt object to knock some sense into me, allow me to explain…
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CableSearch is a neat project by the European Centre for Computer Assisted Research and VVOJ (the Dutch-Flemish association for investigative journalists) which aims to make it easier for journalists to interrogate the Wikileaks cables. Although it’s been around for some time, I’ve only just noticed the site’s API, so I thought I’d show how such an API can be useful as a
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Google Fusion Tables is great for creating interactive maps from a spreadsheet – but it isn’t too keen on easting and northing. That can be a problem as many government and local authority datasets use easting and northing to describe the geographical position of things – for example, speed cameras. So you’ll need a way to convert easting and northing
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It’s been over 2 years since I stopped doing the ‘Something for the Weekend’ series. I thought I would revive it with a tutorial on They Work For You and Google Refine… If you want to add political context to a spreadsheet – say you need to know what political parties a list of constituencies voted for, or the MPs
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Here’s an example of how APIs can be useful to journalists when they need to combine two sets of data. I recently spoke to Lincoln investigative journalism student Sean McGrath who had obtained some information via FOI that he needed to combine with other data to answer a question (sorry to be so cryptic). He had spent 3 days cleaning
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On Friday I had quite a bit of fun with Churnalism.com, a new site from the Media Standards Trust which allows you to test how much of a particular press release has been reproduced verbatim by media outlets. The site has an API, which got me thinking whether you might be able to ‘mash’ it with an RSS feed from
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The rather lovely DocumentCloud – a tool that allows journalists to share, annotate, connect and organise documents – has finally emerged from its closet and made itself available to public searches. This means that anyone can now search the powerful database (some tips here) of newsworthy documents. If you want to add your own, however, you still need approval. If
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If you have a spreadsheet containing geographical data such as postcodes you may want to know what constituency they are in, or convert them to local authority. That was a question that Bill Thompson asked on Twitter this week – and this is how I used Google Refine to do that: adding extra columns to a spreadsheet with geographic information.
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The following is an unedited version of an article written for the International Press Institute report ‘Brave News Worlds (PDF)‘ For the past two centuries journalists have dealt in the currency of information: we transmuted base metals into narrative gold. But information is changing. At first, the base metals were eye witness accounts, and interviews. Later we learned to melt
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