As we all know, the traditional newspaper business model has been under attack for a few years and newspapers have started to fail. Whilst most papers seem to just complain about troubled times, the UK's Guardian newspaper is being more imaginative than most, and has launched a web services platform enabling open access to its content. Time will tell if this is a smart move, or if they can leverage it into a viable business opportunity. At the moment, the intention is to support the service with advertising.

The API supports a number of datasets "curated by Guardian editors and open for others to use". Of particular interest is the integration with OpenStreetMap for geotagging applications. The hope is that Guardian readers will geo-tag newspaper articles, allowing other readers to find the articles and content (eg. pictures and video) for their area.

As the Guardian has launched the Free Our Data campaign to make UK Government map data from the Ordnance Survey, Highway Agency, freely available, it is good to see that they are putting their money where their mouth is (or "dog fooding it" as US software engineers would call it) and using open map data.

Further information on the Open Platform can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform .