One of the fun consequences of the digital age is rethinking the term "Public Record." A long time ago I suppose public records were only really public in name. If you wanted to find out what your neighbor paid for her house, you had to go down to the county tax assessor office, and look up the records. Today I just look on Zillow. If I wanted to find out if my neighbors were Republicans or Democrats or Communists or whatever, I might have to actually talk to them a bit. Now I can just search in Fundrace.Yesterday I stumbled across the most interesting one yet: Criminal Searches. A few of my friends showed up in that database, though (mostly) for traffic tickets. Creative searches turn can turn up celebrities like Senator Larry Craig and his infamous bathroom conviction. The data is not complete, however -- there's nothing that I could find on Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
It's only a matter of time until all of this data is available in relational, mash-upable form, perhaps through Freebase.
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