Now that the guidelines for the publishing of local council spending data have been published, it's a good point to take stock of how councils are actually, well, publishing the data. And the picture is none too pretty.

Out of the 66 councils (of a total of 434) publishing data (they have until January to start doing it), only 32 are publishing it in the correct format – as a comma-separated file which means it's easy to open in spreadsheets or import into database, or reuse in mashups. The rest are using a variety of tricky formats (e.g. Word, Excel files) that make it problematic at best to use the information as data, and to combine it with other data, so that it can be compared it over time, and with other authorities.