I came across a useful post on the blog ouseful.wordpress.com. The blogger, Tony Hirst, blogs about whatever he finds interesting. He figured out a way to scrape the data off of Wikipedia using the Google spreadsheet function =importHTM(””,”table”,N).
The blogger gives detailed instructions on how to extract a table containing population data from England using the Google spreadsheet function. He then uses Yahoo! pipes to geocode the data and create a Google mashup. It’s a very ingenious method of extracting limited datasets!
Another blogger, GoogleMapsMania, suggested using Batchgeocode to get the latitude and longitudinal data and then applying that data in the Google Spreadsheet Map Wizard to map out the data
I was surprised to read that Google has decided to cancel its data hosting service, nee Palimpsest. The name Palimpsest came from the book, Archimedes Palimpsest. To read more on the project which recently restored Archimedes Palimpset click here.
Google was originally planning to host Terabytes of data, including astronomical and large governmental data sets. Many bloggers had been hailing Google’s service as the start of a new era of transparency for the USA.
The decision to cancel Google’s Palimpset came just a week ago. The sharp downturn in the economy played a key role. Google’s stock fell from an all-time high of about $700 a year ago to around $300 today. This caused Google to sharply curtail “experimental” programs that have no guaranteed revenues.
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