Information trailblazing | InfoWorld [Video]

The game is over for proprietary data pumps

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Last week Matt McAlister, InfoWorld’s director of online product development, forwarded me a list of the week’s 10 most-read stories. I was tickled to see a couple of my stories among them. “You can log in to the reporting system for more detail,” Matt said, so I did. Twice. First I logged in to the Web interface that selects report intervals. (No luck doing that on Mac OS X, by the way, where Mozilla, Safari, and MSIE all failed the browser check.) Then I logged in to the Java applet that delivers the reports. Once you burrow into the inner sanctum, you can see the data sliced and diced in every way that the system’s designers thought you might need. But there are two huge problems: You can’t link to those views, and you can’t link to the data that supports them.

I won’t take potshots by naming the vendor …