[...] and 2009. It was created by Vancouver artist Jer Thorp, whose terrific work we’ve mentioned before. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Knight News Challenge: Aaron Presnall’s data-viz project hopes [...]

[...] this month at Times Open, the newspaper’s conference for developers. He was interested in the Times’ newly released APIs, which could help facilitate his work while expanding the potential for analysis. (However, they [...]

[...] number of very interesting uses of the NYT APIs //Nieman Journalism [...]

[...] web guys (all guys) who ran the show on Friday spent much of their time touting and explaining the APIs they’ve been releasing since October. In the biggest news to emerge from the conference, Andrzej Lawn and Michael Donohoe previewed the [...]

[...] of APIs they’ve been releasing. (I explained what APIs are and gave a preview of Times Open in a post yesterday.) There’s a lot of excitement here about the future of journalism, and I’m collecting [...]

But I think we should not abandon a healthy level of some skepticism.

We should keep in mind that these API’s are almost certainly not being offered (purely or even mainly) out of a sense of altruism or public service. The publishers will almost certainly charge for these services when and if the demand grows sufficiently – it makes no sense not to. (Keep in mind that onlline newspapers are getting increasingly desperate for funds, and you’d be naive to assume this would be an exception.)

Just look a the terms of service. Some TOS’s outright restrict the use to non-commercial purposes. Others, like the NYTimes, (appear to – for now, anyway) allow some commercial uses, but at the same time prohibit any user of the API from employing that API in anything that competes with the NYTimes (current *or future* offerings). If you realize that one of the main motives of those who release the API’s is to see what good ideas others can come up with, is it such a stretch to assume that these same companies will be eager to implement good ideas themselves, regardless of where they came from? And then notify you that you’re now competing, in violation of the TOS?

In any case, even without the incentives just discussed, I’d be very careful about building a business (at least one that requires more than a trivial investment) around services that are provided by a third party, especially when that party’s terms of service declare they can change anything at any time they want. That’s just good business sense.

Just my $0.02.

[...] Original post by Nieman Journalism Lab [...]

[...] las nuevas aplicaciones que han salido a flote de la mano de otros emprendimientos, esto representa un gran paso para el perfil de los medios tradicionales que sin lugar a dudas ayudará a miles de [...]