Data.gov is lame (so far)

Data.gov has come out of the gate lame. This is the Obama administration's new site for sharing executive branch data in formats friendly to programmers and stat junkies. It's got the Sunlight Foundation goo-goos excited: They're offering a $10,000 prize for the best application and visualization using Data.gov's data as a way of encouraging the government to do more of this sort of thing. Craig Newmark of Craigslist, who's putting up some of the prize money, called it "a genuinely big advance in grassroots democracy." I'd like to see more government data sharing too, but to say that "we've just taken an unprecedented first step into the Era of Big Open Government," as Jake Brewer of Sunlight wrote on the Huffington Post, is to believe that the promise of something is the same as delivering it. Rounding up a tired collection of not very interesting data sets already available on other government Web sites (The Residential Energy Consumption Survey and Patent Application Bibliographic Data, together at last!) and serving them up on a not unattractive but cramped search page is barely evolutionary, much less revolutionary. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb lamented that it was "a bit of a let down" and noted that the 47 data sets there now "lean toward the least controversial matters." He searched for keywords like food, prisons and drugs -- and came up empty. It’s the tough stuff, the stuff that challenges real vested interests, that matters, of course. It reminds me of the poor marks given to Kentucky's OpenDoor Web site, which has made a show of making state spending transparent, while failing thus far in the execution. If you tell me you've spent so much for widgets, but not who's supplying the widgets and at what terms because, golly gee, doing so would piss the widget supplier off, you haven't really told me anything useful, much less praiseworthy. Yes, intentions are good, and Data.gov is promising to listen to suggestions and get better, but I'll save my huzzahs for meaningful results.