On Tuesday I released the last eleven years of Boing Boing posts all in one file to celebrate Boing Boing's recent anniversary. Large datasets are fun, and we wanted to see how the great minds of our readers would twist all this information into something more awesome.
We were not disappointed. This morning I found out that ntoll over at FluidDB collected all the information in the XML file into their centralized database system. ntoll's post on the FluidDB Boing Boing repository explains a little bit about the structure of their system and how to access it as an API for use in other web applications, programs or plugins.
The system is pretty easy to access using their various wrappers (in Python, for example). You can find the documentation for FluidDB here as well if you're interested in developing an application on top of this database system.
Clearly, this is a very interesting project with a lot of far-reaching implications for developers and interested people looking to play around with the Boing Boing archives. I'm looking forward to seeing what new applications of our data come out of this.
If you're working on something neat with this data, you can let me know directly either at dean@boingboing.net or via Twitter.
[How we made an API for BoingBoing in an evening] Thanks Tom!
