Governments worldwide are starting to crack open their data vaults and let users rummage inside. It is possible to track down each open government initiative individually (Australia, UK, US, NZ) but the UK Guardian has taken the slog out of that by building a gateway to them all. As new government data comes online, it is added to the gateway, for which there is also an API.

You can search for government data from countries, cities (London, New York) and states (US and Canadian) around the world. See the full list. The Guardian does wonders with data visualisation on its data blog. See their Top 10.

The EU is going down the open data road too.

Wouldn't it be nice if an Australian newspaper did this kind of work, and we could get transparent government spending data like this?