I found a new medium.
AI finally gave me the tools to actually explore public data, and I can't stop. Here's the week, in what I made and what I'm learning.
Boston Tech Week, Emerson College. A New Creative Stack.
Public data is something I am becoming very interested in. AI has unlocked it in a way that makes it feel like a new medium, one I get to explore as a creative producer.
The scale of it is what gets me. There are something like twenty-five million public datasets sitting out in the open, free, and until now you basically had to be a data scientist to get anything out of them. That is the part that changed. Twenty-five million datasets, plus AI that can finally read and combine them, adds up to a medium that did not exist for someone like me a year ago.
Now that language and technology have given me access, I can make tools that reach into data, process it, and play with it, and I am seeing endless possibilities to create value: to learn, earn, discover, tell a story, make a point, or delight people. It is fascinating to think about all the latent insights sitting out there, waiting. We only have to go explore. It is fun, it is endless, and it is full of adventure.
So much of it is similar to the way I make a video. Computer capabilities layer together into a tool the same way video, audio, effects, and the other pieces of production layer together into a video, telling a specific story within specific constraints.
A bakery for public data
I created a space to play with data called Data Bakery.
Everyone has the same public data. Census numbers, weather, flight paths, permits, prices. It sits there, free, for anyone. So the raw material is not the advantage. The advantage is the bake, putting two sources together in a way nobody thought to and seeing what appears that neither one showed alone. That is where the craft lives.
You pick a couple of public sources and combine them with one of fourteen possible moves, like laying one over another, using one source as a proxy for something you cannot measure directly, or crashing two together to see what collides. The fun is in the rare pairing. I built it to delight you at the surface and reward you if you look closer: simple and shareable for the curious, the full method underneath for anyone who wants to see how the sausage gets made.
One. Search interest sees a company's sales coming a quarter early.
Two. AI data centers, EVs, and solar all bottleneck on the same boring box.
Three. There are more trees on Earth than stars in our galaxy. By a lot.
Go explore it yourself at the Data Bakery. Grab two ingredients, or open the pantry to see the sources and the moves underneath. Then tell me the strangest combination you make.
► Watch the flyover on LinkedIn
Pass it on
If you know someone who would like this, please forward them this issue. It's the best way you can support my work, and help keep me flying.
Erich