Google Releases API for Cool Visualization of Data Mashups from Many Sources

Wow! The problem remains though of the availability of data. While there are lots of repositories of data. Still, a shocking amount of it resides in published (and unpublished) reports, closed databases, webpage tables and other places where it is not easily exploitable by tools like this (for example, the climate monitoring data in recent news).

They mention "data locked away in PDFs is now usable"...but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the data in a PDF report is still likely just as locked away. Somebody has to manually type in hundreds or thousands of figures into a database or spreadsheet.

We (collectively humanity) need to come to a point where we internalize the principle of "data wants to be free" and make it easily accessible.

I think this would be a useful tool to examine climate data.