Tech news from the Guardian

Today the Guardian announced something pretty cool for us geeky peeps. They’ve created an API so that companies and individuals can access and interact with all their content and information. And I think that’s awesome!

Let me first of all say that I am biased – Unchained is a content partner of the Guardian. I like most of the stuff they do. But I’m really looking forward to what comes out of this.

When other newspapers are foolishly thinking about making a return to the paid subscription model, the Guardian is instead opening up everything they have and giving it away freely for people to do with as they please. They’ve got it right – that’s the way the internet works as far as I’m aware! And because they’re doing this, their content will go further, their brand will appear in more places, individuals will do really creative stuff that’s attached to the Guardian brand and they will engage deeper with audiences. Pretty simple really. Their only challenge is to attach a revenue model to it somehow. And that revenue model is probably based on attracting a more international audience.

I’m just really looking forward to seeing what creative things people do with the content. Here’s some stuff I’d like to see:

A Jonathan Harris style app that graphically shows how good or bad any day in history is according to the main news stories of that day.

An application to test Nostradamus’s prophesies – that maps them against the stories they allegedly foretold.

A Visual Thesaurus kind of application that lets you browse related articles.

A sweary news application that just adds expletives into a story to add more emotional depth.

A game that picks out 3 headlines from any day in history and you have to guess what day it was.

What would you do with it? Put you ideas here and we’ll maybe see if there are any developers who fancy building them.