Recently The New York Times has been making quite a push to open up some of its internal software development to the rest of the world.
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A large, labeled data corpus of articles is available
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They’ve recently exposed an article search API
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IBM’s technology behind Many Eyes is now being used for a white label social visualization silo within The Times’ site.
Obviously as one of the worlds legendary newspapers, The Times developers have unique repositories of content to work with. Counter that with a business that seems to be springing leaks in its revenue streams left and right. Careful observers will note that commercial usage is typically prohibited, so don’t plan on making a bundle off of their content. In any event, it’s admirable that such a significant media concern is making so much available for people to experiment with.
One thing they could be doing on the blog though, is promoting external projects that leverage Times open source code and web APIs. If they had an evangelist, probably can’t afford one, I wonder what they would do.
Now if we could only get The New Yorker to venture out in a similar way!