But wait! There's more, thanks to Gary Price:

"Satellite company GeoEye is now live with a satellite image (half-meter) of the National Mall taken this morning. You can also download/save a hi-res version of the image. Image here with publishing guidelines: http://geoeye.com/CorpSite/gallery/detail.aspx?iid=220&gid=1 Hi-Res image here: http://geoeye.com/CorpSite/gallery/image-viewer.aspx?m=h&iid=220&gid=1

Peter Harkins, at his blog Push CX, suggests "Three rules for data base creation and management":

1. All Fields Become Optional

2. All Relationships Become Many-to-Many

3. Chatter Always Expands

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One of the things most frustrating about the apparent inability of journalists and journalism educators to grasp -- and utilize -- the Digital Revolution showed up in my mailbox this week.

I received a note from Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.  The note starts by pointing out that "We are living through a perilous, but fascinating, time in journalism."  Then he -- or more likely some copywriter -- goes on to suggest that the "future of journalism" depends on my subscribing to and reading the Columbia Journalism Review.  Dean Lemann closes: "...I hope you will subscribe to CJR.  We won't disappoint you."  The solicitation included a postage-paid envelope and this form:

Here's the thing: Nowhere in any of this communication is there a suggestion that I can -- should, in fact -- subscribe and pay for that subscription online!  Not only would it be easier for me, but at the very least the CJR wouldn't be billed by the post office for that return envelope.  Forget about the fee charged by some last century copy writer, the printer and the mailing and fulfillment houses. 

This is just one example of the poor list management from the CJR.  In fact, I already am a subscriber, but there is nothing on this solicitation to tell me when my subscription will lapse.  Without that data, why should I re-up?

The CJR isn't alone.  Here's another from The Atlantic offering me a great deal on a renewal.  Once again, no data about how long I have on my current subscription.  No suggestion that there might be a way I could renew and pay for that renewal online.

We subscribe to a lot of magazines.  This type of know-nothingness happens weekly.  It's no wonder the industry is in decline.  Its management just doesn't grasp how to reach and relate to subscribers and customers, both actual and potential.

It's good to see some analytic methods creeping into event coverage, at least when it comes to a known site and an event with a long walk-up.

A couple days ago, IAJ co-director Steve Doig had a piece on MSNBC.com "How big will inaugural crowd be? Do the math When people gather in vast numbers, 'official' estimates often run wild." Steve suggests that the wild numbers running toward 4 million are simply not possible. You can't put a gallon in a quart jar.

The NBC Chicago also weighed in with 'Record or Not, No Head Count Planned for Inaugural." This story, like Doig's, discusses how contentious crowd-counting can be, especially if the methodology is shall we say "Informal."

And Saturday, old friend Ford Fessenden, at the New York Times, and his colleagues offered up "A Million Here, a Million There." The Times' graphic does a great job of mapping the Mall in Washington and giving some good estimates of the crowd.

This brief piece illustrates how newspapers, TV and radio stations "could" be supplying data/information to their various communities and, at the same time, create data bases that their reporters can draw upon.  Why, for example, don't all newspapers have a searchable DB of all possible election results or local ordinances?

Gitmo Database Details 779 Prisoners’ Cases
by Eric Umansky, ProPublica - January 15, 2009 4:28 pm EST

Margot Williams, of the New York Times, spearheaded the "Guantanamo Bay Docket." (Photo by Lars Klove for the New York Times)

One of the handiest—and least-noticed—places for finding that information is the New York Times’ "Guantanamo Bay Docket [2]."

Launched quietly on November 3 (when some folks were busy focusing on other impending news [3]), the searchable database has government documents on all of the prisoners the Pentagon has acknowledged have been held at Gitmo. 779 have been detained there since 2002; 248 remain there today.

For example, here are the details of the government’s case [4] against alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. (KSM is just one of 16 high-value detainees still held at Gitmo. The Times’ project has details on each one [5].)

The docket has about 16,000 pages overall, almost all from court hearings. You can search through all of the documents. For example, interested in seeing all the times "torture" has been mentioned [6] at a hearing?  There’s also a handy timeline [7].

We found the project so interesting that we decided to ring Margot Williams, the Times’ database research editor, who has spearheaded the effort. Margot has been involved in breaking Gitmo stories for years. In fact, she’s such a junkie, she said she put a recording of KSM’s confession [8] on her cellphone.

"I don’t know what compels me to do this, but for years I’ve been compiling lists of people in secret detention. So I’ve been in ‘list mode’ for seven years," Williams told us.

What the Times did was combine the information Williams has been compiling and linked it up with the government documents on each detainee. "Wikipedia and a few other sites have posted some documents. But they’re not searchable."   

Williams warns that the documents—even the thousands of pages of them—don’t tell anything close to the full story. "This is only one side, it’s not presenting the defense teams’ sides. I’m hoping to get those documents in, but that’s hard because most of them haven’t been posted.

"I’ve read the 16,000 pages.  That’s where I pull the information that goes in the database.  I am a reader of documents. There’s no substitute for reading every line of every page. As they said on the 9/11 commission report, it’s about putting together the mosaic and seeing the patterns.

"In my mind’s eye, this is the form I’d hope the government would make them available in rather than dumping them in unusable formats.  I’m glad we’ve made the documents more useful for people to figure out for themselves who these [prisoners] are."