Aaron Swartz has a new venture, watchdog.net. It’s an open endeavor to build a hub for politics on the Internet. It’s part of a growing trend, data-driven sites to mine and use the structured data that is becoming more prevalent on the Internet every day. Another is Adrian Holovaty’s EveryBlock (“a news feed for your block”).

It’ll be interesting to see how these play out. Making beautiful browsable interfaces to rich data is one thing; making them useful beyond surfing for trivia is another matter. It’s hard to imagine two guys better suited to do it than Aaron and Adrian. I think great things could happen here.