A great interview with Adrian Holovaty at Online Journalism Review makes you think about all the opportunities that the world’s media are missing every day, as we’re still working with our “big blobs of text” instead of structuring information:

Much of the information that journalists collect, day to day, is structured. Information such as crime reports, obituaries and event listings always follow a certain pattern, which can be richly exploited by databases. The majority of newspapers takes the time to *collect* this information — which is the hard part — but they dramatically reduce its value by NOT storing it in structured formats. Instead, they distill it into big blobs of text for publication in their print editions, and then they shovel those big blobs of text onto their websites. At this point, all structure is lost: Crime reports can’t be sorted or searched intelligently, and event listings can’t be viewed in any sort of user-friendly way.

The interview has lots of links to essential sites.