Sorry for the light posting this week, folks. I’m working on developing some recommendations on photo acquisition and usage for our Argo-bloggers. But meanwhile, I wanted to pass along this Sunlight Foundation project.
You’ve seen this before: governmental entity releases treasure trove of data, news org data-geeks get really excited and spend weeks building a searchable database for it, public yawns.
I think the Sunlight Foundation’s clever spin on a recent data dump might keep it from being just another searchable database. Weeks ago, the Clinton Presidential Library released copies of all the emails Kagan sent while she was working for President Clinton. On the suggestion of a friend of Sunlight, coder Tom Lee spent a recent weekend pulling those emails into an interface that’ll look familiar to a lot of folks: Gmail. At ElenasInbox.com, not only can you search through the emails, you can also star them (like you can in Gmail), and check out the ones starred by other users.
No big takeaway here; I just thought this was a pretty adorable project. I don’t expect our Argo-bloggers to spend their weekends designing clever interfaces for various government data repositories.
I mean, not that I’d mind, of course.