More than 250 million global events are now in the cloud for anyone to analyze

The E in GDELT in quite misleading, since it's about the media footprint of events not about the magnitude or relevance of the events themselves.

Recommended reading in this context:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/mapping-kidnappings-in-ni...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/05/2...

If anyone feels like playing Hari Seldon, media footprint is a decent first approximation of magnitude of relevance, once you strip media celebrities.

This is great news! I actually worked with Kalev on this in 2007-2009 in collecting the event database at University of Illinois, and it was one of the most interesting experiences of my life. Glad to see it finally opened up for general public/researchers.

Some innovative history teachers should start incorporating this dataset into curricula somehow.