Barack Obama has said we need a "Google for government."
It's a nice line, but what does it mean? Federal agencies have been online
since the mid-'90s. Obama's first crack at a Google-for-government law led to USAspending.gov, a budget
tracker that looked like everything else the feds had put up on the Web--until
I saw one geek-speak phrase on the home page, so small I almost missed it: API
Documentation. To understand its significance, let me tell you how I got subway
schedules on… more