Ideas and Projects

Well, the first half of my open source economics project is off the ground with over a years worth of data posted. EconoIndicators: Open Source Economics - the Economic Indicators has been going since July 2007.

Here is some of the good, bad, needs improvement, etc.:

• Good: Lots of data
• Needs improvement: Indexing/categorizing/tagging. I wanted the data to be searchable by the name of the indicator, the date, by what the indicators measure, by the source, by cyclical/countercyclical nature and by whether the indicator is coincident, leading or lagging. Because I made a certain decision about how to «check» the category boxes, you can't always search by higher level categories - in other words, you can search for «Federal Reserve», but not necessarily for «central banks». The other flaw is that most of the data are not categorized as lagging, leading or coincident.
• Needs improvement: I'd love to include international indicators, but that's too much of a time issue since the direct return on my time for this site is about 10 cents an hour.
• Needs improvement: Can't seem to get indexed by DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory. DMOZ is free and staffed by volunteers so wait times are very long. Yahoo free submission almost never happens, but I can't pay $300/year to list a site that earns pennies a month.
• Bad: Very time consuming and hard to publish timely as a one man project. I would LOVE to have some economics students take on the task of doing some of the publishing so that the data summaries can go out close to real time.
• Good: Have had at least one citation in an academic paper, which was a big part of the reason for the project.
• Bad: Got spanked by Google for selling text links. I'm no longer doing that, but Google never reinstated my rank and, since the site is still indexed, I can't ask to be reincluded in the index.
• Bad: Unprofitable. Especially since I stopped selling text links. Not a big issue except that it is so time consuming. With the need to devote roughly an hour a day to this and related projects, I'm eating up time that could go to efforts that would mean more short run cash.
• Bad: Seen as «duplicate content.» Even though the core of the site, the front page, is summary data that I produce, the copies of government data and news releases that I include are considered «duplicate» content by just damn near everybody even though they are a) perfectly legal and b) there specifically to provide value (convenience) to the readers. A big part of the idea behind the site was the fact that I'd go to the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg or whatever and read about the latest economic data and then have to go searching to find the actual data. I wanted to provide data from various sources, summarized and with as complete data as legally possible in one place. Search engines, EntreCard and one advertiser all thought this was somehow «wrong» though they couldn't any of them specify exactly what the problem is.

The second half of the project is EconoModels, which I have ready to go in terms of the site, but with no content and no real prospect of content at the moment. It's almost got to be collaborative and there are no collaborators, so it may wait a bit longer.