learnandteachonline.com

So the datasbases show up publically on a page that looks like a Google search results page.

But now I've moved on to thinking what kind of data I'd want to put there. The contents of my Drupal aggregator and my blog posts don't need to be there to be seen online because they are right here in a more appropriate format. For people who care about a lot of traffic, I suppose that's one more place to have links in.

What would be more useful? Putting up all my podcast posts would be nice, because my RSS feed is set to show only the last 30 and there have been 81. But I could link to my page on some of the podcast directories that have somehow retained info on all episodes.

I haven't been able to determine if you can only put tables on Google Base, or if it's relational, and if it can be relational, how would a user look at crosstabs. That would be useful.

Good for stuff you don't want to make into a big deal

Even if you can only show flat tables, I can think of one category of data I might put on Google Base: informal reports. Here's what I mean. I think about the kinds of data I handle every day, and a lot of it has a reason to be online, like a shopping cart. The database exists to make products available for purchase online.

For data that's used online a lot, an organization will naturally want to invest in building or adapting an off-the-shelf app to display it.

Example. But let's say there's a need to share with a distributed group some data that isn't often output online, it's just a one-off need. An example might be a part of a database whose main mission is to deliver a buyers guide directory.

The bulk of the data is the vendor contact info and categories, but there's also one little table that manages banner ads. It contains rotation ratios, advertiser names, URLs of the advertiser's sites and URLs of the banners' image files.

An ad rep is doing an presentation and wants to show the prospect a little slide show of all the banners ever run in the buyers guide. As persuasive as the rep probably is, she's not going to get anywhere if she wants an online app built for one presentation. But! If that one little table were uploaded to Google, she'd have a page to go to in her pitch, a nice list of links to the banner images, where she can click and show.

Bottom line, I can see gBase used in situations where you don't want to invest a lot of time or money in putting data online. You think?

Or maybe its market is individuals, not organizations. Could be it ends up getting used more for party invitation lists or soccer team rosters than for banner ad URLs.

Tell me what I'm not seeing. I'm sure it's a lot. I haven't read any commentary about it because I wanted to look at it on my own first in a real life context. Only now I'm tired of thinking about it and probably won't go read what others are saying. Not right now anyway.