The Guardian, Google, and the Open Knowledge Foundation have launched a new competition to find the best open government data visualization. The announcement states: “Governments around the world are releasing a tidal wave of open data – on everything from spending through to crime and health. Now you can compare national, regional and city-wide data from hundreds of locations around the world. But how good is this data? We want to see what you can do with it. What apps and visualisations can you make with this data? We want to see how the data changes the way you see the world. In conjunction with Google and the Open Knowledge Foundation (who will be helping us judge the results), see if you can win the $2,000 prize.” Read more

Simon Rogers of The Guardian recently reviewed what the publication learned about data journalism after covering the London Olympics. Rogers writes, “There was never a guarantee that it would amount to anything for us. The Olympics may have been the only news story in town last week and would undoubtedly produce great journalism, but would it result in data journalism? At its essence, this is the gathering of stories from data. It’s more than just producing a few charts – data visualisation is often the expression of data journalism, but the process of digging through the data to find the stories that matter, that is at its heart.”

He goes on, “At some levels the omens were not good. The key results data is locked up in lucrative deals between the International Olympic Committee and major news organisations. So, those results tables on our site, the BBC, The Telegraph and so on were paid – The Guardian’s is a feed from the New York Times and we were explicitly banned from releasing that feed as open data for you to download and explore with. As I wrote earlier, while it was not the first Open Data Olympics – it was arguably the first data Olympics. So, what can an open data journalism site do in that situation? This is what we learned.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy The Guardian

If there’s one thing the Semantic Web arena is full of, it is start-ups. In fact, the slew of creative and innovative ideas out there coming from young companies is one of the reasons for the first Start-Up Competition to be held at the Semantic Tech & Business conference in San Francisco this June.

If you fit the bill and haven’t checked out this opportunity, you should, right this way. Are more opportunities waiting in the wings for entrepreneurs? Yesterday Congress sent the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business) Act bill to President Obama for his signature. Once he signs it – and the White House has said that is the intention – entrepreneurs no longer will be prohibited from advertising their intentions to raise funds for their companies to investors, because the Act abolishes the general solicitation ban. As reported by The Washington Post, “the bill also establishes a framework for crowdfunding — which enables small companies to solicit equity capital from myriad small-dollar investors.”

What’s the reaction from some members of the Semantic Web community?

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Brittany Darwell of our sister publication, Inside Facebook, recently reported that Guardian.co.uk attributed 30% of its referral traffic in February to The Guardian‘s social reader app on Facebook’s Open Graph. Darwell reports, “That’s up from 2 percent only six months ago. The change is largely the result of a Facebook canvas application that lets users read Guardian stories and share them automatically via Ticker, Timeline and News Feed. This is yet another example of Open Graph driving significant traffic to third-party apps and websites. For a few days in February, Facebook even surpassed Google in referral percentage to the Guardian, though it hasn’t maintained the lead.” Read more

Facebook today posted that users now officially can upgrade their profiles to its Facebook Timeline by heading here. Timeline, as Mark Zuckerberg described in September, is Facebook’s way of helping uses curate the stories of their lives, calling out the most meaningful events and recent highlights. During the F8 Developers’ Conference, he said that Facebook had “rethought from the ground up the heart of the Facebook experience.”

The Open Graph protocol, based on RDFa, provides power to the experience, enabling applications to focus on filling out user Timelines with lightweight activities, and on discovering new things through friends in what Zuckerberg at the time called a frictionless experience. As an example, he noted the debut of the Open Graph Spotify music app that adds to a user’s Timeline the songs she listens to, radio stations, and albums.

Other Open Graph app launch partners announced at the event in the fall were The Daily, Dailymotion, Earbits, The Guardian, Hulu, iHeartRadio, The Independent, Izlesene, Jelli, My Video, Netflix, Rdio, Slacker, Songza, The Washington Post, and Yahoo. Others, such as The Huffington Post, joined later. In late November, Facebook said that the publishers building social news apps to help users see what their friends or reading or to view past top articles are seeing good early results.

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The Guardian recently published a piece on the vital role of local leaders in pushing Open Data initiatives. The article states, “The starting point for transparency – opening up and democratising public data – should have at its heart public service outcomes for citizens and communities and relevant data should be open to all those deciding upon, designing and creating these outcomes.” Read more

Get ready for some new apps for Elsevier’s Sciverse framework. Last year Elsevier, which has one of the largest vaults of scientific data in the world, launched its Sciverse Applications module. This provided a way for researchers and scientists to develop and share customized solutions that improve search and discovery of its wealth of integrated content and meta-data in the SciVerse hub of ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Sciverse SciTopics, and targeted web content.

Now it’s announced the winners of its Apps For Science competition, social and semantic ones that plug into the framework among them (see above). Elsevier recognizes that when it comes to meeting researchers’ search and discovery needs, it can’t do it all alone. “We’re not going to come up with all the solutions ourselves, so a key goal is to collaborate with developers and researchers to provide tools,” says Rafael Sidi, Vice President Product Management, Applications Marketplace and Developer Network, Elsevier

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A recent article reports, “Many newspapers and other traditional media entities still think of themselves as delivering their content in a specific package… But few are thinking about their businesses in radically different ways — as content-generating engines with multiple delivery methods, or as platforms for data, around which other things can be built. USA Today appears to be moving in this direction, by opening up its data for others to use and even commercialize, following in the footsteps of The Guardian and its ground-breaking open platform.” Read more