Various commentators over the past year have made the observation that “Data is the new oil“. If that’s the case, journalists should be following the money. But they’re not. Instead it’s falling to the likes of Tony Hirst (an Open University academic), Dan Herbert (an Oxford Brookes academic) and Chris Taggart (a developer who used to be a magazine publisher)
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There have been quite a few scraping-related stories that I’ve been meaning to blog about – so many I’ve decided to write a round up instead. It demonstrates just the increasing role that scraping is playing in journalism – and the possibilities for those who don’t know them: Scraping company information Chris Taggart explains how he built a database of
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This is the fourth part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. You can find part one here, part two here, and part three here. Human capital So here’s person number 4: Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economist. Fifty years ago he used the phrase ‘human capital’ to refer to the economic value that companies
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I have now released the source code behind Help Me Investigate, meaning others can adapt it, install it, and add to it if they wish to create their own crowdsourcing platform or support the idea behind it. This follows the announcement 2 weeks ago on the Help Me Investigate blog (more coverage on Journalism.co.uk and Editors Weblog), The code is available on GitHub,
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Now this is an example of what’s possible with open data and some very clever thinking. Chris Taggart blogs about a new tool on his OpenlyLocal platform that allows you to send a Freedom of Information (FOI) request based on a particular item of spending. “This further lowers the barriers to armchair auditors wanting to understand where the money goes,
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Having made significant inroads in opening up council and local election data, Chris Taggart has now opened up charities data from the less-than-open Charity Commission website. The result: a new website – Open Charities. The man deserves a round of applause. Charity data is enormously important in all sorts of ways – and is likely to become more so as
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A disturbing discovery by Chris Taggart last week: a number of councils in the UK are handing over their ‘open’ data to a company which only allows it to be downloaded for “personal” use. As Chris himself points out, this runs completely against the spirit of the push to release public data in a number of ways: Data cannot be
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