links for 2010-08-17

It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there's no similar labelling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content.

Can computers do a better job than journalists in sports journalism?

Dr Kristian Hammond, of the Intelligent Information Laboratory, looks at whether a computer armed with facts and figures from a football match can produce a passable match report.

And that’s exactly what we’ve done at OpenlyLocal, adding the data from all the councils who’ve published their spending data, acting as a central repository, generating the URLs, and connecting the data together to other datasets and identifiers (councils with Snac IDs, companies with Companies House numbers). We’ve even extracted data from those councils who unhelpfully try to lock up their data as PDFs.