The launch of http://data.gov.uk (runs on Drupal), a central place for making uk government datasets available to the public can only be a good thing. It will prove useful for geeks making mash-ups, but also hopefully help journalists, policy-makers and the public make informed judgements about everything from road safety to public expenditure.

However, as with most datasets, they provide "old news". Data collection is not a trivial process, and then the data has to be validated before it is published. This all takes time. And by the time the data is published, it is often way out of date. This uncertainty is a real problem when you want to make a decision about what you should do in the future.

I was just theming some "read more" links for the news section of a new site. The design I am building calls for an ugly great button on every news item's teaser, which consists of just a headline (the node title) and a teaser that is a couple of sentences long.

For evidence I've conducted an extensive survey of newspaper websites. I even visited some terrible right-wing ones like the Telegraph.