One of the inspirations behind this software and the concept of the datasphere is Adrian Holovaty's Chicago Crime which I first say at Mashup Camp 1. Heavily data driven, almost everything in CC is a link -- you can can freely navigate through the data by clicking around. I'm sure if it's strictly-speaking a datasphere application because it doesn't bubble up the data for reuse in the HTML, but one could fairly easily envision how it could in the future.

Adrian has a great post about where he should think newspapers should be going and there's directly applicability to the concept of a datasphere:

But it doesn't stop at those obvious examples. If you take some time to examine what sort of information newspaper journalists collect, the amount of structure will jump at you. If I may take the liberty of giving examples from Web sites I've worked for:

• An obituary is about a person, involves dates and funeral homes.
• A wedding announcement is about a couple, with a wedding date, engagement date, bride hometown, groom hometown and various other happy, flowery pieces of information.
• A birth has parents, a child (or children) and a date.
• A college graduate has a home state, a home town, a degree, a major and graduation year.
• An Onion-style "On the Street" feature has respondents, answers and a publication date.
• A drink special has a day of the week and is offered at a bar.
• The schedule of the U.S. Congress has a day and multiple agenda items.
• A political advertisement has a candidate, a state, a political party, multiple issues, characters, cues, music and more.
• Every Senate, House and Governor race in the U.S. has location, analysis, demographic information, previous election results, campaign-finance information and more.
• Every known detainee at Guantanamo Bay has an approximate age, birthplace, formal charges and more.

See the theme here? A lot of the information that newspaper organizations collect is relentlessly structured. It just takes somebody to realize the structure (the easy part), and it just takes somebody to start storing it in a structured format (the hard part).

Note that Adrian's mostly talking about recording the structure behind information so new applications can be developed. But the beautiful thing about bubbling up the information into the HTML is you can start cross linking data between different sources (i.e. mashups!).

In case you're wondering, the icons you're seeing here are called Silk and can be previewed here. We'll work out a better attribution page once we've got the v10 look and feel a little more stable.

There's also a super cool set of countries of the world icons from the same team. We don't have a user for these yet but I'm probably going to invent one just because.

I noticed an interesting shortcoming to the Platform today -- you can't define what types of attachments are accepted (the default being certain types of audio and video types defined in the code). Seeing this, I turned off the media checking. Alas, no joy: The post and genpage code only sees the media files. No good for some of the applications I'm intending, where attachment text, code samples, DOC files, PDFs and so forth are needed.

Update: as you can see here now, we've got this fixed.