I wrote about the huge potential in government as a service the other day, and apparently i’m not the only one who has seen the opportunity. The only difference is that while I just wrote a few thought and did nothing, others have actually done exciting work on this front. Some articles in English:
And more in Danish
uploadr is a demo of Yahoo’s upcoming BrowserPlus and it looks amazing. When you install the browser extension, developers get access to features usually not available in browsers. Such as drag-and-drop from the operating system and browsing-for-multiple-files. That should some on handy. And I want it for 23. Now.
Now the question though: What do I do with those files? How do I transfer them from the user’s computer to my server? According to the current list of services, that isn’t on the menu for version one. From the demos it seems that the only way to actually use the dropped or browsed files is through Ruby (on which a FlickrUploader corelet is based). Weird. It’s nice to see Yahoo trying to compete with Google on openness and extensibility, but am I the only one seeing a big black whole in the service offerings here?
The Notify service look interesting as well. Too bad that it’s text based only. I’d love be able to show recently uploaded photos to interested people visiting 23. Or buddy icons when people post on twitter. Or … [Update: Even better. There's a Yahoo logo on popup notifications in Growl.]
ReadWriteWeb just posted an intriguing article about the next generation of e-government. The post basically lists the arguments from an upcoming scholarly article about the subject. The main argument is simple: Government shouldn’t spend it’s time building web sites, instead it should “focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data”. Rather than building and maintaining a website of upcoming bills at ft.dk the Danish parliament should make the data available and have others mash it up in usable ways.
Now, I’m not a deregulating liberalist, and I’m absolutely certain that a strategy of only making data available to private entrepreneurs simply wouldn’t work in a Danish contexts. But I’m also convinced that a mandated policy of making data easily available to developers has explosive potential.
Let me list a few examples. The best Danish mapping service, Findvej.dk is a mashup of both publicly and privately owned data. It was built by one guy in with a good idea and access to the necessary data. The data was probably hard to find, and the service would be much better with even more accessible data. But you get my point.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of possible counter-examples and I’ll just pick one. The weather. Denmark has a tax-funded, public weather service, which generates plenty of data every day, and this data is available to everyone through a web browser. Now, given all the data from the weather service, would I be able to build a better website serving all the same user groups as DMI? Probably not. But given access to that data I would be able to build a service which suits my needs much, much better that DMI.dk. And most likely, my service would serve others as well.
Why isn’t there an Danish version of EveryBlock? The reason isn’t lack of interest. The reason isn’t lack of data, because statistics and incident reports are being kept by the police. The reason is that the data isn’t accessible as an open building block (that metaphor didn’t work).
This presents a major challenge to government, and even if I’ve used Danish examples, those challenges are probably both very global and very local. The past few years have shown convincingly that web developers are hungry for interesting data to reinvent by merging across data sources, and this potential could be easily harvested by some sly government initiatives.
Apparently many email systems, include gmail, support magic in the local part of an e-mail address. For example, if your mail address is mymail@gmail.com you’ll also receive mails from mymail+randomword@gmail.com.
The obvious use for this feature is some manual spam protection: When signing up for a web service you can easily include a unique address for that specific service. This might be something like mymail+twitter@gmail.com or mymail+homebanking@gmail.com. If you ever start receiving too much spam from a given service, just blacklist the unique address.
This is slightly off-topic (actually, quite a bit so!) but I’m writing a paper and just learned that you can do search-replace in Word with regular expressions. In my case, I had some inconsistencies in how inline citations were shown before or after punctuation. To solve this, I searched for:
(\([!\)]@ [!\)]@[0-9][!\)]@\)).
And replaced with (after checking the Use wilcards option):
. \1
There are at least three gotchas in the expression:
Having said that, the whole +/*/@ controversy can probably be avoided using {n,m} (ie. {0,} or {1,})