Adrian Holovaty started the day with his session on evangelizing reporting and making data in news articles available for machine parsing (as evidenced in ChicagoCrimes.org). Although I arrived late (something about the Queen St. streetcar trying being diverged, and partly a result of a late night hunt to find a Gypsy jazz band and a Yahoo party), I’ve seen his talk on this before (and he is a good speaker), but it is heartening to see that it was incredibly well attended.

As he has readily admitted, it’s not rocket science, but it is a very original concept to the vast majority of the news industry, including those in the session. Each time he talks, and people see the results (both direct or indirect) of his work, there’s hope more news organizations will begin doing this kind of kind of interactive journalism, along with the more typical multimedia presentations.

From my experience, the two hurdles are:

1. finding the resources (both human and technical) to build out these applications;
2. and making it user-friendly for the reporters to input the data (i.e., creating a WYSIWYG interface).

The first is not insurmountable; there are a lot of talented journalist and Web developers who would be willing to do this kind of work. The second would require a more concerted project effort and training, but the results would continue to pay-off the years.