Duplicate data from newspaper websites
Some newspapers (eg http://www.guardian.co.uk/data-store) make a lot of interesting data available online - why not do a deal to duplicate this in Dallas? It would add loads of great, free content and do so in a way that's much more useful than a csv file or a Google spreadsheet...

Hi Chris,
Have you seen our current news feed from the Associated Press? If not, you can find an overview here: http://www.pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/PartnerDetails.aspx?PartnerId=12884901889&ProductId=12884902241&CurrentTab=1.
You can explore the dataset by clicking the big orange “Trial” button on the right side of the page. This will take you to the Dallas Account and Subscription Management portal, where you’ll be asked to accept AP’s End User License Agreement. Once you do, you’ll be subscribed to the dataset and able to explore what it offers.
If you don’t already have a Dallas account, you’ll need a Live ID and a Dallas invitation code to create one. If you don’t already have a Dallas invitation code, you can request one at dinvite@microsoft.com.
Back to your suggestion… Is this what you had in mind?
Thanks!
2 comments
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azurecoding commented
I keep trying to use the AP data service but it keeps giving me a 500 error.
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Chris commented
Hi Roger,
Yes, I have seen the Associated Press data and no, that's not what I had in mind (although it's cool in itself). If you take a look at the link to the Guardian website in my original post you'll see it's not a feed of news items as such, rather it's a collection of data sets that were relevant to news items. So for example, recently a lot of information on UFO sitings in Britain was declassified and that sparked quite a few newspaper stories on the subject; to back that up, the Guardian actually posted the complete list of the UFO sitings in tabular form:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/aug/17/ufo-sightings-x-files
Of course there are more serious uses, such as government statistics, election results, opinion poll results etc, and in my opinion this is exactly the kind of data that would be useful to business users who are using PowerPivot to perform ad hoc data analysis and combining corporate data with data from the web.Regards,
Chris