Meranda Watling has a good post about newspaper.coms’ online databases:

There are hundreds of useful databases on news Web sites today. But what’s increasingly sad — almost as sad as the tendency to create and dump unrelated databases without any context into data ghettos — is the increasing tendency to create databases of information that, really, a database isn’t useful in helping to understand. In the worst instances, it really just complicates the information for the sake of saying, “Look at all the databases we’re giving you!”

Data ghettos? Nice. I agree.

First of all, I don’t think “database” is a very sexy word to the average reader. I’m having a hard time imagining people I know searching through databases. So, second, databases have to be inviting. I can’t stand to see databases like these that require user input before you can see anything. Did Tom Smith graduate this year? No. How about Molly Baker? Yes. It’s a shot in the dark. The database needs to be presented in a way that catches attention, or at least lays out all the data in a tabular format. Like this.