Google Fusion Tables is a product launched in Google Labs. It’s a free service for sharing and visualizing data online. It allows you to upload data, share and mark up your data with collaborators, merge data from multiple tables, and create visualizations like charts and maps.

With the new API, you can update and query a dataset in Fusion Tables programmatically. The API means you can import data from whatever data source you may have, whether a text file or a full-powered data base.

The interface for DoodleBuzz is simply a scribbled line. Draw a straight line. Draw a curved line. Draw a crazy, chaotic, all-over-the-place messed up line. It’s up to the user how he wants to layout the information.

The application is programmed in AS3 and it uses the News API from Daylife.com. Furthermore for the default search Brendan used Dapper to scrape the top headlines from the Daylife.com homepage.

I have to admit I liked the idea of a more playful interface to news reading, but got quikly distracted by the aesthetics of scribbling with the pen and seeing the typographic results. How about you? Did you like the playful interface? Did it provide any help in finding related or maybe unforseen news stories?

This is great for quickly testing queries or simply to have a play with this great API.

The building blocks of the developement are Processing as the scripting language and Google Spreadsheets as the database. I’m currently also working with Google Spreadsheets so I was pleased to see that others share my thoughts about it’s advantages:

• Handles large datasets with ease
• The dataset is syncronized immediately, thus no need for keeping multiple files updated
• The dataset is editable simultaneously
• Provides the client with a familiar interface to edit the data
• No need for keeping multiple files updated
• Well documented API

I highly recommend to read the full article as it provides detailled information about accessing Spreadsheets using Processing. Jer also shares the source code as he already did for the NYTimes API or the Guardian Open Platform.

Fusion Tables use the Google Visualization API to create the visualizations. The currently available methods are Map, Intensity map, Line, Bar, Pie, Scatterplot, Motion and Timeline visualizations. The graphs provide rudimental interactivity like a basic tooltip for detailled information about markers. Many Eyes has a much broader catalog of visualization methods mostly created with Flash / Flex with a more extensive interaction model. Like IBM’s ManyEyes.com Google Fusion Tables provide an embeddable code to each visualization to take the graph with you.

Google focuses more on the data side of things with Fusion Charts. A user can import and export any dataset as a csv files. The data tables can be edited, merged, filtered aggregated and shared with collaborators. Collaborators can even discuss on rows, columns and cells with a built in commenting system. Nathan from FlowingData.com places the tool between Google Spreadsheets and phpMyAdmin in his review of Fusion tables.

Fusion Tables is in a very early alpha phase and therefore we can’t really make a statement about the usefulness of the visualizations at this point.  We’re very keen to hear your thoughts about the service in the comments.

Yahoo! Placemaker is a geoparsing web service that provides third-party developers the means to geo-enrich content at scale. The service identifies, disambiguates, and ‘extracts’ places from unstructured and structured textual content: web pages, RSS (and Atom) feeds, news articles, blog posts, ad tiles and creatives, status updates, and similar.

The service is not a geocoder – it rather enriches unstructured and atomic content. The API is capable of parsing geodata from plaintext as well as elements in HTML or XML documents. Furthermore it speaks the language of Microformats and understands the geo and adr tags.

For more information see the documentation, apply for a application ID or have a look at an example. Read ReadWriteWeb’s coverage or ProgrammableWeb’s API profile about the service for more information.

Via ReadWriteWeb & ProgrammableWeb

The Google Maps Data API has some serious advantages by the likes of scaling, client libraries, realtime indexin or various rendering tools.

The Data Catalog is currently rather slim but works as a testing ground for querys providing sample code for various languages like PHP, Javascript (jQuery & raw JS), Ruby, Flex, Silverlight among others. The Developers Page hosts documentation on the API’s query, format and paging capabilities.

We’re very happy to see public data getting this level of attention lately with Amazon, Google and now Microsoft stepping into this area. Making publishing data easy, secure and economic helps overcome some of the barriers in the way to open data utopia.

Via Azure Journal

The World Bank API offers developers information contained in the most popular World Bank databases. From projects to data and photos, you can access information by country, by type or by topic.

The included sources are:

• The Little Data Book 2008 (WDI)
• Worldwide Governance Indicators
• Doing Business
• The World Bank Photo Library

The API has a extensive documentation which makes it easier to get started.
To access the data you need to register and apply for an API key. The data can be used on non-commercial applications that needs to be branded using one of the original logos of The World Bank. The license sounds good to me and the obligatory logo may also have an effect on the credibility of the application. Although a downloadable dataset would have been nice too.

World bank API