Adrian Holovaty and the Post’s Database Explosion

The other day I stumbled across a YouTube video of pioneering journalists/programmer Adrian Holovaty playing the MacGyver theme song on guitar. (The video is on the YouTube homepage and has been viewed 750,000+ times). Seeing the video prompted me to head over to his site for the first time in awhile.

For the uninitiated, Holovaty developed the Django web framework while working at the Lawrence Journal-World, built an innovative online database of crime patterns in Chicago and currently works as editor of editorial innovations at Washingtonpost-Newsweek Interactive. He has a skill set that is unique for the journalism profession (how many journalists do you know that have written a web framework?).

Rifling through his site, Holovaty has done some awesome work at the Post.

• The Campaign Tracker that tracks campaign events attended by 2008 Presidential hopefuls. This is tied to a more expansive database on 2008 candidates. Erin wrote about this previously.
• Faces of the Fallen is a moving look at the soldiers that have died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
• Mixed Messages is a comprehensive database of political ads from the 2006 cycle.
• McCain’s Money takes a lot at contributions to McCains PAC, Straight Talk America.
• Clinton’s Golden Voice is a Google maps mashup of former President Bill Clinton’s speeches between 2001 and 2005. He collected over $30 million in speaking fees during that period.
• The Votes Database records every vote by members of Congress dating back to 1991.
• Video Game Reviews is a database of, wait for it, video game reviews.

The coolest thing is how well integrated some of these databases are into the site itself. As an example, any article you read that contains a Senator’s name will link back to that Senator’s voting record. It is great stuff and creates a much better reading experience than most papers.

But these features also demonstrate what a huge technical challenge newspapers face when trying to implement this stuff. As an example, if you read this article about last night’s Republican debate, you’ll see links to John McCain’s voting record and a general search page for Rudy Giuliani. Since the article is about the Presidential race, I think you’d ideally want to link to the Presidential profiles of Giuliani and McCain and not the more general information. This is brought up not as criticism, but to show how hard and complicated this kind of stuff can get.

Another challenge is how to integrate these features into the site itself. As mentioned, the Votes Database is beautifully integrated. But I go to the Post site just about every day and had never seen features like Faces of the Fallen, Clinton’s Golden Voice or the Video Game Reviews database. The Post invests the time to develop these great features, and then they sort of disappear into the labyrinth that is the Post’s site structure. It is like those stories you hear about people finding Mickey Mantle rookie cards in their grandparents basement.

But I’m quibbling. Check out Holovaty’s site and the Post features listed above.  More people need to do this stuff.