There were two trivial little things I saw on my flight out to Sweden to speak at Internetdagarna. The first made me smile in a “oh how nice you thought about that and made it just for me” bit of whimsy. It was that my boarding pass said API OK.

It was nice of them to check and to put a little status message on their I thought and then returned to the real world smiling.

Then I got onto the plane and discovered that the online magazine was called CloudShop.

Of course it is, it’s in an airplane, they fly in the clouds, but nevertheless it made me feel like I was in a Sixth Sense type world now where “I see datastores”.

With the advent of commercial APIs and datastores, data.gov.uk, GLA datastore, the emerging datastores in Australia and New Zealand, the soon to be launched Swedish equivalent and of course data.gov itself what we need to work more on is easy tools for people to get at and compare the data and most importantly we need to teach data literacy at school. I think of the inspirational great work David Smith is doing at St Paul’s in Barnes which shows it can be done, and done well, but it needs to spread and fan out and be part of the curriculum.

I just can’t wait for the day Sam comes home and says his homework is to analyse and compare pollution data for London from the year 2009 and we go on adventures through data together.