"Fast-forward nearly four years and a similar scenario may be playing out. On March 25, the New York Times published a story tying increased equine injuries to the sport’s overuse of medication -- legal and illegal -- lax regulation, and a shift of track ownership to casino companies that provide little racing oversight." Thoroughbred Times follows up on NYT story, runs its own injury numbers.

"Sometimes when dealing with data, you’re given incredibly useless PDF files instead of databases and csv files.... However, there is a tool that can help you liberate that data. You can use Pdftotext to convert PDF files into plain text files. This makes them much easier to manipulate and work with."

"As a handicapper and speed-figure maker, I want racing to have precise data and I want Trakus to succeed. So I offer a modest proposal. The company should formulate a report that allows users to log in to, say, the Gulfstream Web site and see the key Trakus measurements in the previous starts of every horse on the Gulfstream card. It should invite users’ feedback — letting thousands of eyeballs look for errors that might otherwise go undetected. The company needs to be less focused on developing whizbang graphics and more concerned about giving the best, most accurate data to handicappers."

"Think of data as a silo that exists within the cloud. That data can be tapped at anytime, from anywhere, using tablets with applications specifically designed to access the data and give it context. That has precisely what is happening in baseball."

"It seems very short-sighted. It's a classic example of one part of racing trying to get a slightly bigger slice of the cake, regardless of how big the cake actually is, or what it might mean in a wider sense."

"So the challenge for 2011 isn’t just making use of all the data that’s available, it’s making use of it responsibly, linking data together to come up with a true picture."

Resources and tips from ProPublica.

"Last Friday, a race nearly started at the wrong point on the track because of confusion generated by the program. The race was to be run at about 5 1/2 furlongs on turf, but because of wet conditions was run at 5 1/2 furlongs on the main track. In the program, the distance was noted by its fractional equivalent, 11/16, which racing people don’t use. Because the fraction looks like 1 1/16, you can understand how the gate initially was put at the sixteenth pole, the starting point for a mile-and-a-sixteenth race, before the problem was corrected." (Via @EJXD2)

"Of all of journalism’s recent evolutions, data-driven reporting is one of the most celebrated. But as much as we should toast data’s powers, we must acknowledge its cost: Assembling even a small dataset can require hours of tedious work, deterring even the most disciplined of journalists and their editors. Fortunately, there’s an affordable -- and amazing -- tool that can make the impossible easy: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk." Pro Publica explains.

"This is how baseball’s archives are created now -- not by merely storing videotapes on a shelf, as it has been done for decades, but by a team of 'loggers' whose job is to watch every game as it happens (2,430 during the regular season, and up to 41 in the postseason) and add computerized notes on every play, no matter how ordinary."

An example and a detailed how-to.

Very interesting app for visualizing chart data (API to come).

Photo-finish camera company develops system similar to Trakus. "With this system, you can get a split for every inch of the track, and you can see all of the velocity and acceleration peaks for each horse." (Testing at Laurel early 2010.)

Platform for sharing and mashing open data on any subject.

"I have some advice for those starting or involved in open data projects. First, figure out what you want the world to look like and why. It might be a lack of corruption, it might be a better society for citizens, it might be economic gain. Whatever your goal, you'll be better able to decide what to work on and learn from your experiences if you know what you're trying to accomplish. Second, build your project around users."

"The British Horseracing Authority has made tremendous strides with its website, which is now very usable. But it is a long way from being ideal and I would suggest that the BHA's money would be better spent, in the first instance, on improving the service it provides to existing fans of the sport, before it worries about bringing in new people whose attention it will not then be able to keep." Offers five excellent suggestions for improvement, including the addition of a "well-maintained statistics section to rummage through."

"And if you think Twitter is noisy, wait until you see Google Wave, which doesn’t hide anything at all. Imagine that Twhirl image below with a million dialog boxes on your screen, except you see as other people type in their messages and add new files and images to the conversation, all at once as it is happening. It’s enough to make your brain explode." The challenge for the live/real-time web.

"This flourishing ecosystem of startups is just one sign that scientific publishing is moving from being a production industry to a technology industry. A second sign of this move is that the nature of information is changing."

"A new camera and software system in its final testing phases will record the exact speed and location of the ball and every player on the field, allowing the most digitized of sports to be overrun anew by hundreds of innovative statistics that will rate players more accurately, almost certainly affect their compensation and perhaps alter how the game itself is played."

Baseball, football, basketball ...

Historical criteria as applied to 2009 Kentucky Derby prospects. Includes 2003-2008 Derby fields and 1998-2008 top three finishers for background.

Items #3 and 4 are particulary exciting to contemplate.

"Wouldn’t it be nice to have an open web-based book database/search engine that would catalog all books and point to everywhere selling them online? That would link to reviews and resources etc? That could plug into libraries' catalogs as well?" Once users get a taste of what can done with data, they always want more.

Another source of worry for publishers online: "Now that the Semantic Web is no longer just a research project, if someone owns the taxonomy you're using and changes it up on you, what rights do you have in the matter?"

Track anything you can count.

"When we evict people from their webpages, fuck all is required." Chilling.

Popularity of search queries in US states.

(Just about) Spot on, beating the old media (and most of the established web) at the data game.

"Simply put the entrepreneurs who are aggressively open in describing their plans seem to do better than the ones who are cagey."

Expect the web to get a whole lot more organized, and soon

Beyer speed figures for Breeders' Cup fields

Beyer speed figures for Derby fields

Polytrack results through August 17, 2007