In the mix...democratizing access to data, data literacy, and predictable responses to proposed privacy bill

1) Infochimps launched their API. People often ask, are you guys doing something similar?  Yes, in that we are also interested in democratizing access to data, but we're focusing on a narrower area -- information that's too sensitive and too personal to release in the usual channels. In any case, we're excited to see more movement in this direction.2) Wikipedia began a trial of a new tool called "Pending Changes." To deal with glaring inaccuracies and vandalism, Wikipedia made certain entries off-limits for off-the-cuff editing.  The trade-off, however, was that first-time editors to these articles couldn't get that immediate thrill of seeing their edits.  Wikipedia's trying out a compromise, a tab in which these edits are visible as "pending changes."  It's always fascinating to see all the different spaces in which people in a community can interact online -- this is a new one.3) The Info Law Group posted various groups' reactions to the privacy bill proposed by Representative Rick Boucher. Here's Part I, here's Part II. Fairly predictable, but it still never ceases to amuse me how far apart industry groups are from consumer advocates.4) Great discussion continues on the concept of "data literacy." I love this guest post from David Eaves on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog, with the awesome line:

It is worth remembering: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.