Not quite as abstract and "strategic", perhaps, as Reuters' OpenCalais play, but the news that the New York Times is opening up as an API of some sort is significant. They have to make money from their content, and yet they look like they're giving a lot of control over it to other programmers. What stronger example could one wish for to argue that it's good to open up access to content that we actually want people to use as fully and freely as possible?
RWW's article points also to a post that I didn't remark on first time around: APIs and Developer Platforms: A Discussion on the Pros and Cons.
About Me
- Jeremy
- Web person at the Imperial War Museum, just completed PhD about digital sustainability in museums (the original motivation for this blog was as my research diary). Posting occasionally, and usually museum tech stuff but prone to stray. I welcome comments if you want to take anything further. These are my opinions and should not be attributed to my employer or anyone else (unless they thought of them too). Twitter: @jottevanger
2 comments:
I'm trying to get there too: http://api.sciencemuseum.org.uk/documentation/ (more coming soon)
Cool Frankie. Looking forward to seeing more.
Right now at MoL things are pretty limited, though Mia's got the OAI gubbins in the works. In theory you can search our publications and also do a geolocation task: converting OS grid references to latitude and longitude. But we haven't yet decided what to do about publicising these - I think you're right just to put them there and see how it goes. It would be quite an achievement if it was popular enough to crash the server, after all!
I guess I'm all talk for now :-)
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