Data are news

Tom Loosemore, blogging MP Tom Watson — and others, including the Guardian — have been fighting to get more public data made public in the UK. Now Watson and Loosemore have launched a $40k prize to mashup this data and come out with lots of lemonade. Here‘s Paul Bradshaw on the movement. Here are some — as a Brit tweet said — stonking good ideas already.

: LATER: This tweet by Charles Arthur of the Guardian — “wtf? No downloadable school league tables?” — made me realize that newspapers are also foolish not to make their data mashuppable. If we put out all our sports data as tables that could be downloaded and mashed up people would build no end of great stuff on top of us. That’s thinking like a platform. WWGD?