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US Opens Up All Sorts Of Gov't Documents

from the this-is-good-news dept

Mon, Oct 5th 2009 7:30pm — Mike Masnick

While we've been disappointed by some moves by the Obama administration (on copyright, federal shield law, civil liberties, warrantless wiretapping, etc.), one area where the administration has made really big strides is on opening up formerly locked up gov't information. The latest is that the Government Printing Office and the Office of the Federal Register have just opened up the "Official Journals of Government" -- a document that used to cost a mere $17,000/year and is now available for free, online -- and made the Federal Register (basically the list of what the federal gov't is doing every day) XML enabled, so that anyone can do cool stuff with it. Ed Felten's team at Princeton has already created FedThread, which let you not only search the Register, but also annotate and create customized feeds. This is really great...

Filed Under: data, federal register, open, transparency, us gov't, xml

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Fed Employee, 6 Oct 2009 @ 4:22am

An interesting note:
FedThread.org is blocked by the DoD filters.
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mkam, 6 Oct 2009 @ 9:42am

Re: An interesting note:
Not on my DOD box. Must be a local block.
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Derek Reed, 6 Oct 2009 @ 11:05am

Had no idea there was a DoD following on techdirt ....

I can see how comments / discussion on the fedthread could be exponentially more useful than the raw data, too bad no one's started yet and it's all really boring to read.
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Rosedale (profile), 6 Oct 2009 @ 1:36pm

More info for your reading pleasure
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/questions-and-answers-about-th.html

"I gathered questions from a variety of sources, including on-line discussion groups and twitter, and have been doing email back and forth with both Ray and Mike. Hope this is useful (it certainly has been fun to do)!"
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TJ, 7 Oct 2009 @ 7:51pm

boingboing link broken
The boingboing article still shows in their own search, but returns a 404. Did they pull it because it was inaccurate or what? Hmm.
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