While I applaud the Obama administration’s creation of recovery.gov to allow more transparency about the effectiveness of stimulus dollars, it still isn’t there in terms of mashability.  The site acknowledges this gap, and its encouraging that enough people asked the same question I did that it was added to the FAQ since I first looked. The FAQ also points us to a (without hyperlinking to?) another web site, USASpending.gov, that does have a good API for government spending information. I've aleady used that one (see my next blog post). 

I have been working with a number of APIs to governmental information including the Sunlight Foundation’s Sunlight Labs APIs and Capitol Words APIs. GOP.gov also exposes interfaces to get information from the House Republican Caucus.  Dems.gov, on the other hand, is decidedly Web 1.0.

One suggestion for sites that don’t have formal APIs using access methods such as SOAP is to present data in text with some straightforward formatting. As effective as a flash presentation of information (or even a static jpg like the one above) may be to convey meaning to a site visitor, it is not useful for the purpose of ripping and reusing the underlying data.  With a little planning, your site may be scrapable by a programmer or using a service such as dapper.net.

DB's post riffing a bit on the Large Hadron Collider spurred some random thoughts on my part.

The earth is still here today, but despite premature media fearmongering, it's because the collider hasn't started colliding things yet - they only sent the particles in one direction. So things are OK - for now. That lets everyone get up to speed on the science, which is good.

I'm not surprised by the play that the LHC Rap has received on YouTube, and one of the key investigators at LHC is former rocker Brian Cox. It used to be that rockers wanted to destroy their hotel rooms, but now they're aiming higher. And while I'm at the random connections, how many ex-rocker physicists named Brian do we need?

After the East Bay Earthquake last week - the biggest earthquake in the East Bay all week - I checked Twitter to see how many status updates would follow and, sure enough, there they were.

But what's going to happen after the LHC really does start colliding things? In the spirit of the site to check to see if Abe Vigoda is still alive, there is one that now checks on the status of planet earth. Though that seems a little old school - we've been checking on Abe since Web 1.0 days.

However, checking status may not be feasible if everyone is gone, so the day before the collisions start, I think I'll load up Leon's Gratis Status facebook app with half "the earth is gone", and half "the earth has survived", and roll the dice. If nobody is left to observe, maybe they'll both come true!

Next up: what is the sound of two hadrons colliding?

Brijit is a web site that offers 100-word-or-less summaries of long form content (from over 100 sources). It combines editorial expertise with user-contributed content, sharing, ratings and feeds, and ultimately points you to the original source for a full read. For the serendipity-minded it's a great source of info, and paradoxically can save you and cost you a lot of time! It's advertising-supported, and well worth a look.

There - I summarized Brijit in less than 100 words, so I'm off to a good start. Thanks to Gary Peare.

If you need a little break from all the web 2.0 enthusiasm, kick back and enjoy the Richter Scales' rework of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire".

Thanks to Frederic Jean.

No, it’s not a new version of Star Trek, it’s really an article in the Wall Street Journal (fee required, but not for long!). I’ve been saying lately that in 20 years, we will not have a President of the United States because of the incriminating photos that were on MySpace and Facebook. Well, here’s some interesting support for this hypothesis:

WSJ: Are millennial M.B.A.s also proving demanding for career-service offices and corporate recruiters?