For those of you keeping an eye on the ball, working hard on your Apps for America 2 entries, I’ve got some great news for you: Data.gov has given itself a slight upgrade, adding a bunch more feeds. To compensate, Data.gov has turned itself into three subcatalogs: A raw data catalog, a tool catalog and a geodata catalog.

By far and away, the Tool and Geodata catalogs exceed the Raw Data catalog, but we still don’t have our 100,000 “feeds.” We have 999 data sources in the Geodata Catalog, 999 data sources in the Tool Catalog, and 267 in the Raw Data Feeds catalog. These 999 numbers are troubling. Hopefully the software supports more than 1000 data feeds in each subcatalog.

Sadly the “Federal Government Finances and Employment” raw data category on Data.gov still sits at a whopping 0 despite the fact that the website is run by the Office of Management and Budget. While I’m thrilled that data.gov exists and such effort is being put forth by the CIOs in each federal agency, it goes without say that I wish the Executive Branch would put out more than just the data that is convenient to publish. Why, for instance, does Data.gov link to the search pages for usaspending.gov but not the source data or to the api.

But if we can’t police the government, at least we can police the people. Yesterday afternoon, crime data was released. It looks like the FBI has stepped up to the plate to add crime data from 2006 and 2007 including hate crime statistics and law enforcement officer assaults.

Also exciting is the new “state and local” tab on data.gov. I’m declaring these state sites also eligible for the Apps for America contest as they’re linked to from Data.gov. Hopefully state CIOs will participate in the program and add their data in.

Have at the new data, folks. Enjoy.