Ryan Mark's Page

A couple weeks ago I stumbled across a neat little reading applet called spreeder.com. You copy and paste text into the applet, and then it would flash each word at you one-by-one. The idea being that it forces you to read faster, teaches you speed read or whatever. To be honest spreeder.com was a little annoying [...]

The Sun-Times published the names, salaries and positions of 145,000 Illinois, Cook County, and Chicago employees on their website this weekend. The names and salaries are online in the form of a simple searchable database. The reporter published a couple articles with analysis of the massive database. One article talked about the top ten earners [...]

Looks like the new Tribune editor, Gerould Kern, is working on “saving” the newspaper. The reported redesign takes the news off the front page and buries it in the second section. Whats more important for the front page of a newspaper? “Consumer-oriented and entertainment features.” According to the article at Crain’s ChicagoBusiness.com, Kern said the redesign is [...]

I’ve often wondered what would happen if we could put the legislative branch of the government online and let citizens vote on legislation directly. Get rid of all those layers of representation that we built up and have a true democratic system. While that may never happen (and maybe should never happen), I stumbled on a [...]

The UK government’s ‘Power of Information Task Force’ is holding a competition for the best way to make government data available to citizens. They are offering a 22,000 pound prize/grant to make the best idea happen. Whats really cool is that a bunch of UK agencies published new APIs to get the juices flowing and [...]