Almost 70 localities have now signed up to share their data on New York state's open data platform three days after its launch, according to a state press release. Read More

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo launched a new open data portal Monday, Open.ny.gov, following through on a promise made in his State of the State speech in January. The site will feature data from every New York State agency, and tie in localities from all over the state. Read More

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee is expected to announce today that his city's restaurant inspection data will begin to appear on Yelp, the business listings service. Also included in the announcement, expected at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C., is that Yelp, in conjunction with city technologists in San Francisco and New York, NY, have created what they hope will become a de-facto standard for restaurant inspection data. Called Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification, or LIVES, the hope is that this specification will make restaurant inspection information easy for developers to handle and, as a result, more ubiquitous on the web. Read More

Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo laid out an ambitious open government agenda in his state of the state address, declaring his commitment to provide "easy, single-stop access to statewide and agency-level data, reports, statistics, compilations and information." This week he carved out his first exemption: gun owners. Read More

In his State of the State speech Wednesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he would implement a comprehensive statewide open data portal as part of a renewed focus on transparency. Called Open New York and culled from his list of campaign promises, the initiative aims to "harness technology to show how taxpayer money is being spent, showcase the great resources of the state, and foster productive engagement with government," Cuomo promised in his prepared remarks. Read More

The city releases data on 311 calls on its open data portal every afternoon between 2 and 3 p.m. This afternoon, that data release included calls placed Monday and early Tuesday as Hurricane Sandy whipped up floodwaters, shut off power and blew over trees throughout the city. The data paint a sobering picture of the damage. Arranged by complaint type, New Yorkers as of early Tuesday had placed 5,102 reports of damaged trees, warned of malfunctioning traffic signals 1,074 times, notified the city in 642 instances of an overflowing or otherwise broken sewer drain, and complained of broken street lights 325 times. That's just the bulk of 8,564 reports placed between Sunday and Tuesday for which data is available. It's likely that later data releases will raise that number even higher. Read More

New York State Senator Greg Ball's re-election campaign is caught up in a web peccadillo that might put Ball on the wrong side of a law he himself supported.

Our friend at Capital New York, Azi Paybarah, reports that Ball's campaign sent out an email in the name of Justin Wagner, a Westchester attorney and Ball's Democratic opponent. The campaign told the Journal News that putting Wagner's name in the "from" field was a mistake corrected in subsequent emails, Paybarah notes. The email linked to a website, Wackywagner.com, full of less-than-flattering prose about Wagner.

Wagner is asking the district attorney's office to investigate the email, to which a 2008 change in the law — one that happened with Ball's support — seems relevant.

New York political writer Azi Paybarah sums up Andrew Cuomo's record as a first-year governor. In his first year, Cuomo shepherded through the legalization of same-sex marriage, flouted protesters who had dubbed him "Governor One Percent" by passing tax reforms that increase taxes on the rich, and laid the political groundwork for a brand new convention center to be built in one of New York City's outer boroughs — all largely outside of the public eye. Read More

Occupy Wall Street protesters march on the Brooklyn Bridge on Oct. 1. Photo: blulaces / Flickr Vanessa Zettler moved to New York from Brazil about a year ago, and says she was among the first to find out that Occupy Wall ... Read More