Data ghettos

The other component of the data ghetto that bothers me is that you can’t find that data outside the ghetto. Please, someone point me to a place where there’s dynamic content being fed to the story level pages. I have yet to see where someone’s crime data is being fed into a story about a crime, i.e. a map of murders from the data ghetto’s crime application dynamically generated on a story page about a murder. Or a list of the largest donors to a politician from a campaign finance app on a story about a politician.

And that seems to be a problem we’re creating for ourselves — we’re only thinking about getting the data online, not about what to do next. Or about what else could we do with our data. Or what could someone else do with it if we let them. We’re content with a couple of search boxes, a button and a results page. And we’re content to leave it right where we put it.

• Creativity: Can we offer no more creative way into the data than to make a user put stuff here and hit search? Search is fine in context, but it’s also limiting. What if someone doesn’t know how to spell something, or doesn’t know what they want, or all they want to do is explore the data their own way? You’ve cut that off. In my opinion, browsing is much better. If your data is normalized — i.e. all the cities are spelled the same way, etc. — then you can let people click on the things they’re interested in and get those things. And in the process, they may see other things they’re interested in. To see it in action, look at how PolitiFact is browsable (here, here, here and here). Or better yet, if you don’t believe me, look at chicagocrime.org. There are 10 different ways to browse that data. There’s one search box. Search is a part of it — it has a value in context — but it shouldn’t be your whole app.
• Repeat customers: A lot has been written about the traffic these database sites get. But I want to see what the traffic is like months after it first goes up. What’s the traffic like after the third or fourth update. The reason I ask is because some of these search apps to me seem like a pure voyeur play. What I mean by that is the user sees a salary database, goes and looks up their neighbor and … what? They’re done. They’ve answered the one question they wanted to ask. How are you bringing people back to your data?
• Shaky business model: Are we really building a business model, or even a component of a business model, around making public data searchable? Because guess what? Google is too. That’s right. The search giant is dealing directly with government agencies to help them make their own data searchable. Sound familiar? Think your data ghetto can compete with Google? Do you think people are going to remember your newspaper.com url over Google? Really?