Scotweb2 » government

Retailer and Newspaper release Application Program Integrators – who is next ?

alex stobart — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 06:05:57 +0000

Application Program Integrators ( API ) are one of the wonders of the web age. To a non-technical mind like mine, I imagine them as translation devices that enable data to switch seamlessly from one format to another. They must be clever wee devices.

At the largest social media conference in the world, SXSW the American retailer Best Buy announed that it is releasing its entire product catalogue as an API.

Last week the UK based newspaper Guardian announced a similar move

The week before the Hack the Government people continued to apply pressure on the UK government by organising a day of legitimate API creation.

This movement suggests that corporates and governments are beginning to realise that proprietary data is a concept of the past. If individuals are happy to share their lives on Facebook, why not corporates and governments their business models and processes ? Better interaction will promote trust and loyalty as well.

Who else would you like to see releasing APIs ?

Snow, the English Minister and user participation

alex stobart — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:55:20 +0000

This week, there has been more snow south of the border than in most parts of Scotland. Minister at the Cabinet Office in London, Tom Watson challenged the developers to respond to the customer need

An opportunity for the web 2 community to show their skills as reported by Simon Dickson here

Use of web 2.0 by public services: digitalgovuk

Duncan Stephen — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:33:51 +0000

We’ve been alerted to a great tool that tracks examples of digital innovation by UK public sector organisations. Digitalgovuk keeps track of implementations of public sector organisations’ uses of technologies such as blogs, YouTube, Twitter. There is a really useful tag cloud so you can go straight to what you’re interested in, say Facebook.

The nifty thing about this is that it is all pulled in from Delicious. So if you know of an interesting use of social media by a public service, simply tag it with digitalgovuk and it will appear on the website.

Steph Gray has more information on the project.