Sean Flannagan and I have finally finished initial development and obsessive content compilation for Datamob, a directory that highlights the connection between public datasets and awesome interfaces that people have created to make public data more accessible—including amazing tools like OpenCongress, EveryBlock, and Oakland Crimespotting.

You're intrigued, I can tell. Well, it is, admittedly, a g2g website—that's my this guy's neologism for geek-to-geek, like b2b. We hope it'll be a useful and compelling way for data geeks and developers to find new data sources and inspiration for their projects. And why should the non-geek care? Our mission statement puts it best:

Widely accessible public data enables informed civic engagement, and we believe that providing restriction-free data to developers is the best way to promote the technological innovations that will spread knowledge.

For those of you who do better with visualizations than words, Datamob is a lot like the Google chart API pie chart below: 61% datasets, 28% interfaces, 11% resources, 100% informative, empowering geeky goodness [breakdown as of post time].

My language nerds, I haven't forsaken you. Wondering about the etymology of Datamob's name? Well, the folks at Freebase coined the term "data mob" to describe a group of data-lovers working together to perfect a small portion of Freebase's ambitiously all-encompassing database. As for our Datamob, we hope it'll inspire more institutions with vast reserves of information to put their data out there in accessible formats—and bring together more data mobbers to bring that information to life.

And to ensure I've covered all my geek demographics with this post, a few words on the development of Datamob: For the past two months I've had my head entirely buried in enlightening railscasts, the amazing heroku (a web-based rails development platform), and the somewhat befuddling rails framework documentation. Weren't you wondering where I'd been? This was my first-ever Rails project, and it was an amazing learning process.

For all the buzz about RoR making things so easy even an orangutan could build a slick web app, your average geeky front-end web girl who tools around a bit with the PHP in her WordPress template (that would be me) still had a lot to learn about actual programming work. But figuring it all out was totally exhilarating.

For anyone thinking of taking their first venture into the big, bad world of programming, A List Apart just published two super-introductory articles to Ruby on Rails—they don't include code, but have a great general introduction to the concepts you'll need to know. If you're ready to get coding, I quite liked Agile Web Development With Rails, although Rails 2.0 has outdated some of it.

Happy Datamobbing!

I'm so excited about this: You can opt out of those pesky credit card offers.

I get anywhere from 2 to 6 pre-approved offers per week (most of which are inexplicably from citibank, even though I already have their dividend card), so I've been wondering about this for awhile—and I can't believe I didn't bother to look it up earlier, because lifehacker's known about it for awhile.

Rob's torn (and accepted) application

Aside from wanting to save trees perhaps more than the next guy, I've always been paranoid about throwing these offers away, no matter how much I tear them—especially after all the publicity that Rob Cockerham's fun torn-up credit card application experiment got. Remember? He got a credit card to a changed address on an application that's about as torn as mine ever get before they make it to the trash. Spine-chilling.