Great open government initiative: disclosed.ca

I learned about a great open government initiative while at YAPC::NA 2009: disclosed.ca. Disclosed scrapes data about federal contracts from the dozens of websites representing Canadian public agencies and organizations (like the Canada Revenue Agency and the Correctional Service of Canada).

The information is aggregated, graphed, linked, and made searchable. It's a wonderful tool and a perfect example of the one, eternal, true API: automated web scraping with Perl :)

Are there similar projects for other nations? Anyone know about similar data sources for America?

Hooray for Melody

Mark Stosberg has a great post about the fork of Movable Type and why it's important to both the Perl community and the world.

Once I have my own server running again, I hope to be running it myself :)

http://mark.stosberg.com/blog/2009/06/movable-type-fork-is-an-opportunity-to-harness-cpan.html