New Data Show...

How many times have we opened the morning newspaper or clicked around our favorite news sites and seen a headline that looked something like:

New Data Show...
...Hatred is on the Rise
...Childhood Obesity is out of Control
...the Economy is Cooling?

There is something powerful about 'New Data' headlines. They have a ring of truth about them.  Yet, once we read beyond the headlines we typically find commentary about causes and effects, a photo that stirs up emotions and quotes from experts.

Sadly, the missing piece of a 'New Data' story is most often the data.

Next time you run into a headline about data, poke around.  How long before you have your hands on the raw data?  The facts behind the headline?  Today, we have a large amount of news and opinion sources available to us: TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, the Web, etc.  And every day it seems to grow.  If we don't see an increase in the amount of raw data that is disseminated, we are on the road to a very mushy global society - facts will be hushed like a whisper at a sprawling cocktail party.

Bloggers have the opportunity to fundamentally change the dynamics of data.

Not only can more people participate in blogging than traditional media, but more people can participate more effectively.  At Swivel, we are working to make that happen.  Our mission is to liberate the world's data.  We are making it fun and putting it in the hands of more people so it becomes more valuable.  Bloggers contribute in a special way to the pursuit of liberating data.  They can have an immediate impact on fact checking of current events, but more importantly they can elevate the expectations of an entire generation of Web-savvy youth.  As adults, the next generation should expect to dig into the facts of all news stories themselves.  They should expect the opportunity to look at the data in their own way.  And they should expect the insights they discover to have an impact.

Instead of a one-sided conversation about hidden numbers, we hope future stories about 'New Data' will be social and interactive explorations of the facts.  Good stuff usually happens when people and organizations are accountable for what they say and do.

We like bloggers who like data.  In fact, you'll notice on our home page we are highlighting bloggers who use Swivel data in their posts.  If you're a blogger and you want data for a story, please send us an email (data@swivel.com) or make a request on our data forum.  Think of Swivel as your blog's data department.  (And you can't beat our prices, Swivel is free for public data. :~)

Comments

[Tony Perrie]

Hiding the data behind one person's interpretation is dangerous. In Freakonomics, the authors proved from existing data that sumo wrestlers, real estate agents, and teachers giving standardized tests were cheating. Opening up this data to many eyes democratizes the production of information that already exists. It also allows everyone a chance to scientifically reproduce findings from authorities.

In 1909, Millikan measured the charge on an electron. We now know that this number was a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. Scientists didn't discover this immediately because they didn't know that it was based on a wrong assumption. If his data were immediately available to everyone, this could have been corrected a lot sooner.

[Brian Mulloy]

Hey there, Tony. The Millikan example is spot on.

[Chris]

Wow, how far this site has come since it went live... I might just be making you guys my home page. :-)

I think there's an opportunity for you to become known as great data activists in making source data more readily available (starting within the U.S. to avoid censorship challenges abroad). Maybe even partnering with Google (organizing information etc.).

Another opportunity is for you to provide leadership in the establishment of online data standards (like always including a hyperlink to source data, whether research-related, budget-related, etc.), so source data can be accessed more quickly and easily. Then your user base could tackle generating the content from there, with the data access being made easier for them.

I can see this being really valuable in Congressional spending bills, demographic analysis across all sorts of data sets, and many other applications.