This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 21st, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Vast libraries have found their way online, but government has not kept pace with innovation

in making its data available.

In this week, Sunshine Week, journalists and other fans of open access celebrate government transparency.

Jerry Brito, with the Mercatus Center writing in Regulation magazine says that expanded

transparency should exist not for its own sake, but for the sake of expanded government accountability.

We spoke last week.

I think the reason that government doesn't put data online has two components.

One is ignorance and one is corruption.

I think the ignorance part is the majority of it, maybe 90% of the reason why.

And I think that is just, you know, government does not have a history of dealing with technology

very well. They usually come late to the party. So I think that's

that's a main component. The other component I think is a little bit of maybe not

corruption per se but hiding something and you can take the example of the

Senate website. The Senate website there, you cannot go anywhere on the Senate website and see all of your, of a particular

senator's votes on every bill.

And in fact, Washington Post discovered that they had published in the past

XML documents with... Explain what that is. Well XML is a format for

displaying data but in a structured format.

And what this means is that you can take the data and recombine it in a number of ways.

So you can see how a particular senator has voted, you know, just by senator, or you can see how all Republicans have voted or

...