If you don’t like the weather… go out and make some of your own.
Or was that news?
Apropos of Tim’s pointer to an alarming thread on Dave Farber’s IP list regarding a pending bill to pull National Weather Service data from the Web in the name of capitalism, O’Reilly’s Terrie Miller is making her own — data, that is, not weather. An amateur weather station atop an O’Reilly campus building is tracking weather conditions in and around Sebastopol, California, and contributing the data (via the Citizen Weather Observer Program, or CWOP) to NOAA: the very data set you may not be able to see if Senator Rick Santorum’s bill goes through.
CWOP “is a private-public partnership with three main goals: 1) to collect weather data contributed by citizens; 2) to make these data available for weather services; and 3) to provide feedback to the data contributors so that they have the tools to check and improve their data quality.” It is interesting to note that there’s no explicit goal of providing the data itself back to it’s citizenry.