this data is already available as a downloadable file. Check out ftp://ftp.census.gov/
It's CSV, and it's kinda ugly-looking, but it's available.
The 'full' data set is ...rather huge. The full data set for any particular report is rather huge.
The advantage of this API, I expect, is it allows people to make quick, machine readable queries for useful subsets of the data. If you want a JavaScript mashup that tells you the number of people who live on your block, use this. If you want to know the population of every block everywhere for data-crunching purposes, just download the CSV.
Excellent. Much easier than requesting API keys and parsing JSON. But that's just my opinion. CSV is beautiful. Simple and easy to manipulate into some other format if desired.
this data is already available as a downloadable file. Check out ftp://ftp.census.gov/ It's CSV, and it's kinda ugly-looking, but it's available.
The 'full' data set is ...rather huge. The full data set for any particular report is rather huge.
The advantage of this API, I expect, is it allows people to make quick, machine readable queries for useful subsets of the data. If you want a JavaScript mashup that tells you the number of people who live on your block, use this. If you want to know the population of every block everywhere for data-crunching purposes, just download the CSV.