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The WSJ is reporting that Economicindicators.gov will remain open. To all of you who contacted Senator Schumer’s office: Nicely Done!
From the site:
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics
Administration (ESA) has decided to continue the economicindicators.gov website.
Featuring the economic releases from ESA’s Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic
Analysis (BEA), the site was started by this Administration in 2002 to give
greater awareness to these economic statistics. ESA initially planned to
discontinue the service due to cost concerns but given the feedback ESA
received, the decision has been made to continue the site and improve its
functionality.A popular feature of the site is the calendar that links
directly to economic indicators on the Census and BEA websites. By continuing
the Economic Indicators (EI) site, the fifteen major indicators released by
those bureaus will still be listed, along with links to the full text of each
release. EI’s information will continue to be provided free of charge.Many users also subscribe to the site and have economic
indicators and the full releases emailed to them. There are a number of
technical challenges with this aspect of the EI site – the service often backs
up and fails because of bandwidth issues, releases sometimes take hours to reach
subscribers, and some subscribers receive multiple copies of the releases while
others get none at all. The cost of maintaining the site is almost entirely
attributable to operating this feature.To address these concerns we will redesign the subscription
feature of economicindicators.gov. The new system, which will remain free of
charge, will email an abstract and link so that users can access the full
release on the source website. We believe the cost of rewriting the system
will, in the long-run, be less than continuing to run the existing system. The
new subscription service will be operational in the next few months.Existing subscribers of the economicindicators.gov service were
offered a free trial subscription to the STAT-USA/Internet service (http://www.stat-usa.gov). A number of you have already signed
up for that and we hope you will make full use of it.Thank you for your responses to last week’s notice. We look
forward to continuing to provide economic indicators, in the most efficient way
possible.
Here’s what the WSJ’s Real Time Economics had to say:
The U.S. Department of Commerce appears to have turned away from its plans to
yank the plug on Economicindicators.gov,
a Web portal describing its mission as providing “timely access to the daily
releases of key economic indicators from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the
U.S. Census Bureau.”News of the impending closure of the site had been making the rounds since
last week. Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) complained publicly
about it. And earlier today, a note at the top of the site said “due to
budgetary constraints, the Economic Indicators service will be discontinued
effective March 1, 2008.”Economicindicators.gov mainly acts as a one-stop shop for those looking for
the latest turn of the screw on some of the economic statistics scattered on
other, less-than-user-friendly Web sites maintained by the Feds. But the site
has been included in Forbes.com’s “Best of the Web” directory, which says it
“simply links to the relevant department’s Web site. This might not seem like a
big deal, but doing it yourself — say, trying to find retail sales data on the
Census Bureau’s site — is such an exercise in futility that it will convince you
why this portal is necessary.”
Source:
After Complaints, Econ Data Portal to Stay Open
Matt Phillips
Real Time Economics, February 21, 2008, 2:34 pm
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/02/21/after-complaints-econ-data-portal-to-stay-open/
Chalk one up for the good guys!!
Is this true?
http://pajamasmedia.com/2008/02/how_bad_is_the_national_debt_r.php
After the initial ESA decision to close the site, John Williams stepped up to the plate to continue the data. He has recently indicated that he will keep doing so, in spite of the ESA decision NOT to close the site.
http://www.shadowstats.com/article/273
Well done by all.
I prefer John Williams at Shodowstats and Bart over at nowandthefuture over our Govt. data although we can indeed chalk one up for the good guys. Budgetary constraints…ROFLMAO! Are they kidding or what?
Too embarrassing to let it happen once it hit to blogosphere.
They should have just shut it down without the warning, “rendered” it to Gitmo, and denied it ever existed.
They’re getting soft.
FA, bubba.
Power To The People!
BizLinks | 2.22.08
British bankers to be sentenced in Enron case today BP aims for billions more barrels from Prudhoe Bay Rescues for Homeowners in Debt Weighed — which could make it The Biggest Bail-Out Since The Great Depression Wheat prices could…
I second Movie guy…….
Damn fascists……
It is available elsewhere but that makes it so much easier and instead of parsing through each report, that takes alot more time.
Why did we even get a warning?? Seems that is not the M.O. of the elected these days…
Ciao
MS