Inside Guardian blog

Opening up

The launch of the Guardian Open Platform and Data Store is good news for developers and data junkies - and all of us.

It's been quite a day at Kings Place where we officially launched our Open Platform and Data Store projects this morning, during a remarkably smooth presentation orchestrated by Matt McAlister, the head of the Guardian Developer Network and the brains behind the whole concept.

For a brief period this morning the 'Guardian' was the hottest term on Twitter, which in itself is hugely gratifying, and the online buzz is still going strong.

If this is leaving you baffled or even annoyed by what a couple of commentators have described as 'geek speak', or, more nostalgically, 'Birt speak', I'll try and describe what some of the excitement is about.

For a 'new readers start here' primer, essentially what we have done is allow developers or anyone with enough technical know how, to look at our content and articles, retrieve it and build new things with it.

So Open Platform is a way of allowing Guardian journalism and data to go further than it does through the website, RSS feeds, mobile platform etc., and it allows really creative people to see if they can make new pages, or information filters, or alternative/better presentations of journalistic ideas.

At a recent Guardian Hack Day for example, where we had 24 hours of fun letting people mess around with our insides, someone built a version of the site entirely our of Charlie Brooker's writing, and another rather brilliant piece of fun was a 'numbers filter' so that every large number in an article could be translated into a different unit (teachers or Wispa bars etc). Those were clever but frivolous examples of what we can do.

Something else we've already done is use this open content in conjunction with the Cass Sculpture Foundation, where our articles can now knit into their site like the related news feed on Antony Gormley's page here.

It is all possible because we have built what is known as an API or 'application programming interface'. My rather lame analogy is that building an API turns your web content from flat paper pages into stickle bricks - and anyone with stickle bricks on the internet can connect to anything else. If you have a better analogy I would be pleased to hear it as I'm not sure this one works.

The feedback so far has been astonishingly good, especially from the technical community which is excited to have a new source of material to look at.

You can read more details about the API and Open Platform approach and have a look at our new Data blog, which should tell you about the latest data we have available, or indeed some of the ways that data is being used on other sites.

This 'showing your insides' approach to publishing might seem like a million miles away from the relatively controlled world of top-down journalism, but it is strangely complimentary. We try very hard and spend many pounds a year to put our journalism in from of a wider audience: this is another way to do that. We also recognise that by opening up what we do to more people who have more expertise than we do, we can improve what we do and change the Guardian's relationship with the web and the internet.

It is currently in beta (a test period, for the uninitiated), and we will let you know how things go with it - and what people are doing with it - over the coming weeks.

As ever all feedback extremely welcome.

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Mar 2009
M T W T F S S
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