Today we started at FITC with a wonderful presentation by Jer Thorp titled “Hacking the Newsroom”.
Jer explained how during his free time he built an application to parse and generate statistical information from websites offering news, such as the new york times. From the public APIs provided he was able to gather trends in certain words related to trends during different time periods of the last century.
His main point was stressing the importance of open data and open api platforms, as his findings and work would not be possible without such tools. Information is no longer a medium to keep closed and profit from, but rather a medium for great discovery and innovation that humanity would of never dreamed of before the computer age.