I’m a bit of a data fiend. I love information. Just to clarify I hate actually working out statistics but the end number is pretty awesome. Maybe that’s why I’m attracted to bioinformatics, with its lure of vast amounts of digital DNA to oogle over. Never has so much data been available to us with public APIs and open datasets and it’s there for any of us to use. To me, this is the true purpose of the internet and it’s time we took advantage of that.

Have you ever searched Twitter and looked at the results in realtime? View it now. You are watching tweets appear as they’re written. And lots of them. If only there was some handy way to access this data so you can use it… :scratches head: Oh wait! There’s the Twitter API! And many other APIs you can use to access other information that becomes valuable in the right context. Google even seems to be working on a universal API that will allow different services to connect easily, in an Android-manner. And when you get bored of APIs, you can move onto datasets like the Google NGram Datasets where you have GBs of data to play around with!

The data you want to use is actually there in most cases, the problem is knowing how to manipulate it and actually access it. Overcoming access is becoming easier with handy libraries for interfacing with say the Twitter API and hopefully the shortfalls here continue to be addressed. Manipulating the data and getting meaningful results is unfortunately still very much up to you and me. Maybe in this digital, data-filled era, this is the hardest part.